LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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* UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. | 



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HELPS 



TO 



A LIFE OF PRAYER 



BY 



REV. J. M. MANNING, D. D., 

PASTOR OF TIIE OLD SOUTH CIIUTSCU, 
BOSTON. 




BOSTON : 

LEE AND SHEPAED, PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK: 

LEE, SHEPARD, AND DILLINGHAM. 

1875. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, 

BY LEE AND SHEPABD, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



The Library 
ot Congress 



WASHINGTON 




Stereotyped at the Boston Stereotype Foundry, 
19 Spring Lane. 



PREFACE 



My own study of the subject of Prayer, some 
of the results of which are here gathered up, 
has brought to me a fuller experience of the 
nearness and love of God than I once had ; 
and my earnest wish, in offering this volume 
to the public, is, that others may find the same 
blessed experience, or have it deepened within 
them if it be already theirs. 

J. M. M. 

Old South Parsonage, 
December, 1874. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Nature of Prayer 9 

II. Forms of Prayer 34 

III. The Objects of Prayer 58 

IV. The Fruits of Prayer 84 

V. The Power of Prayer 109 

VI. The Hour of Prayer 134 



PRAYER. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE NATURE OF PRAYER. 

(The word " prayer " denotes, in its most gen- 
Generai eral sense, any form of petition J and 

definition •, i re t • 1 • n • 

of the word j t ma } r De one red to equals or lnferi- 
" prayer." org no i ess than to superiors ; not only 
£to our Maker/ but also to our fellow-man. Yet 
the devout Christian is not pleased to near the 
term used in merely human relations ; ( it is a 
consecrated word, set apart from secular to sa- 
cred uses. ) We do, in form at least, admit a 
kind of sovereignty in those to whom we address 
our prayer. Ostensibly we bow down before 
them, and lift up our eyes reverently unto them, 
as those who hold our destiny in their hand. 

9 



10 PRAYER. 

Such deference as this towards any man, or 
assembly of men, seems to be inconsistent with 
the doctrine of human equality ; it strikes the 
thoughtful mind as bordering on sacrilege, as 
coming very near to idolatrous worship, and it 
is tolerated only as a time-honored way of deal- 
ing with persons in authority, in which not half 
so much reverence is felt as professed. 

Prayer, then, in its appropriate use, is always 
a religious exercise. It brings the 
inTsago'tu creature face to face with the Crea- 
tor. While man is speaking it is 
God who giveth him audience; the voice of 
the finite child commands the ear of the infi- 
nite Father J 

But even in this its highest and most sacred 
use, the word prayer may have either 
a specific or a general meaning. In 



Strictly a 



petition. - 

strictness of speech, we pray unto God 
only as we entreat him to bestow favors on 
ourselves or others ') the exclamation of the 
Publican was strictly a prayer. It is said, 
however, that the Pharisee stood and prayed, 
though he only thanked God that he was able 



ITS NATURE. 11 

to have a very good opinion of himself. Here, 

then, the word is used in its broader sense ; 

and in this sense it is used throughout the 

Scriptures, denoting any form of ad- 
More gen- 
erally any dress from man to his Maker. Our 

g ™ ss Lord taught his disciples to pray ; yet 
L the Lord's Prayer embraces much be- 
sides the asking of favors from God. It begins 
with an invocation ; we first recognize the 
relation in which God stands to us, by calling 
upon him as our Father. We then express hu- 
mility and reverence by representing him as in 
heaven, while we remember that we are on the 
earth. Next our souls pour themselves forth 
in adoration — " hallowed be thy name." From 
this we rise to a view of the absolute dominion 
of God, exclaiming, with ardent desire, 

Example . 

of the " thy kingdom come, thy will be done 

prayer. * n ear th as it is m heaven." Following 
this is the petition — a prayer in the 
strict and proper sense of the word, included 
within the general address, which is also balled 
a prayer. And even this specific prayer con- 
tains a confession of sin, and the claiming of a 



12 PRAYER. 

certain, worthiness on the part of the suppli- 
ant, which he urges as a reason for his own 
forgiveness. After these various utterances, we 
still pray by submitting ourselves and all things 
to God, ascribing unto him the kingdom, and 
the power, and the glory. 

From these examples it appears that any lan- 
guage through which we address our- 
mu2T selves t0 God — be that language ex- 
WitUG ° d pressivc of penitence, adoration, vows, 
or desire — comes within the scrip- 
tural definition of prayer. J Talking or commun- 
ing with God is the general truth which the 
inspired writers have always in mind ; and so 
solemn and overawing is God's presence, that 
while we are conscious of speaking to him our 
thoughts naturally take on reverent, lowly, and 
prayerful forms. 

The Scriptures also reckon as prayer that 
spirit of worship which makes us love to draw 
nigh to God. When we are bidden to pray 
without ceasing, as in Eph. 6:8, it cannot be 
the outward act of prayer which is enjoined, 
since the command would then be wholly out of j 



ITS NATURE. 13 

our ability to perform.) If faithful to all other 

duties, we can spend but a small part of each 

day in external acts of devotion, fit is not to 

an outward exercise, but to an habit- 

An habit- 
ual state of ual disposition; not to audible prayer, 

but to a prayerful spirit, that the Bible 
refers when it tells us to pray without ceasing,^ 
In this devoutness of the renewed soul we find 
the last and holiest meaning of the term prayer. 
It is to this inward flame, ever mounting up unto 
God, that the apostle points when he says, " pray- 
ing always with all prayer and supplication in 
the spirit." * By praying in the spirit he evi- 
dently means to say that we must be under the 
guidance of the Holy Ghost, in order that we 
may rightly offer up our requests to God. ^And 
since the blessed Comforter comes to us in- 
wardly, not outwardly, This phrase, praying in 
the spirit, also teaches us that true prayer 
never consists in the external form, but in the 
desires and aspirations of the soul. Therefore 
it is no periodic utterances of articulate or 
audible prayers, but the hidden life of commu- 
nion with God, which the Scriptures enjoin. St. 



-L4 PRA YER. 

Paul may properly exhort us to pray always, 
since by prayer he means a kind of divine 
friendship and intimacy, a walking and talk- 
ing in spirit with our God. Such being the 
nature and essence of everything worthy to 
be called prayer, we can readily see how it 
becomes a constant and life-long duty, and why 
all men should give it their most earnest and 
sacred heed. / 

There is, then, such a thing as secular prayer, 
but more properly the word conveys a religious 
idea; also, as expressive of worship towards 
God, it may be either specific or general,— 
denoting simply requests made to him, or, more 
broadly, any utterance designed for his ear; 
and in this divine relation the word may denote 
either the formal act of prayer, or the un- 
spoken spirit of devotion. Of these five dif- 
ferent meanings which the word may have, 
the last seems most important; not 
lardTabit only because it alone may be a con- 
mostim " stent and indwelling habit, but be- 

portant. 

cause it is the fountain and inner 
substance of the others. Prayerfulness is the 



ITS NATURE. 15 

root and the life of all forms of prayer. It 
may be called a divine society, for it makes 
God the daily companion of the praying spirit, 
— he comes and takes up his abode with it. 
It is an uninterrupted intercourse and commun- 
ion of soul. Whoever prays after this manner 
dwells in God and God in him, so that it may 
be said of him, in the strong words of Chrys- 
ostom, that his entire life is an unbroken 
prayer. 

Let me ask you, therefore, to attend a little 
Whatis further to this apostolic definition of 
involved. prayer, that we may not be mistaken 
as to what it is or. what it involves. 
|/ 1. Prayerfulness, or praying in the spirit, pre- 
supposes, first, some degree of likeness to God 
in character. This inward life of prayer is 
felloAvship with God, and there can be no real 

fellowship between those whose char- 
Must be _. . - 
moral nbe- acters and tastes are wholly dissimilar. 

Q s d s ° A thorough metaphysician can have 

but little intellectual sympathy with 

one who is given up to po&try. (The man of 

retirement and thought is seldom congenial 

\ 



16 PRAYER. 

to the man of affairs. Their callings in life 
develop opposite tastes, different social wants. 
If the pastor of a church is consecrated to his 
divine studies, in the midst of a people whom 
God has called to the varied pursuits of this 
life, they will often find it a little hard to be 
entirely at ease and free in each other's 

Opposites 

cannot be company, however great their mutual 
snip. ° V l° ve an d esteem may be. / Allowance 
must be made for the effect of differ- 
ent kinds of earthly discipline, or there can be 
no Christian brotherhood.^ Charity, oftentimes, 
is but another name for this social hospitality. 
Men are like musical instruments. If two 
violins have been tuned to a different key, it 
is in vain that we strive to play them in har- 
mony; they will give forth only dis- 

Antipa- 

tinesin cords. In the world of matter there 

are attractions and repulsions ; from 
which fact some ancient sages inferred that the 
particles of matter have active and intelligent 
souls, which prompt them to seek out and be 
united with homogeneous atoms, and to repel 
their opposites. Just so is it in things spiritual. 



ITS NATURE. 17 

In morals and religion, more than anywhere else, 
sympathies and antipathies show themselves. 
Souls which have been differently tuned will but 
clash when we attempt to make them move in 
unison. What fellowship hath righteousness with 
unrighteousness ? or what part hath he that be- 
lieveth with him that is an infidel ? is the 
argument in Corinthians. ' There can be no 
mutual confidence or intimacy between two 
persons, one of whom is govero/ned by 

Moral dif- . * 

ferences conscience and the other by selfishness, 
enable." ^t i s those of like character, and that, 
too, a holy and upright character, who 
become true friends, and are gradually drawn 
into the bonds of social endearment. Neither 
with the good nor among themselves can the 
evil be long at peace. Every unrenewed soul 
is itself the field of a perpetual war. But 
Christians would, without any divine command 
to that effect, be drawn together into perma- 
nent fellowship. 7- The church rests 

A natural 

law makes upon a law of nature. The renewed 

the church. i i • , • i u 

soul obeys its own impulse, as well 
as the word of God, when it seeks member- 
2 



18 PRAYER. 

ship in the church. *So far as the spirit of glory 
and of God rests on them, Christians have a 
strong propensity to this fellowship one with 
another, under the covenants. It is a witness 
that we have passed from death unto life, that 
we have this drawing of soul towards all 
Christians. 

And now, if an immoral person can have no 
oneness of spirit with a good man, how much 
more true must it be that he can have no com- 
munion with God ! Our God is perfect in holi- 
ness ; he cannot look on sin, save with infinite 
abhorrence ; he turns away, with immeasurable 
loathing, from every impure act or desire. AYe 
cannot pray in spirit unto such a God, while 
we have no spiritual likeness to him. What 

felloAVship hath light with darkness ? 
eise so o P - what concord is there between Christ 
asGod° " an d Belial ? what agreement hath the 

temple of God with idols ? Our God 
shows great and tender love for us when he 
says. " Be ye holy." The argument is, " for I 
am holy." That is to say, communion with me 
is the crowning blessing of your life ; but I 



ITS NATURE. 19 

am holy; therefore you must be holy in order 
to that communion. /Our Saviour expresses the 
same truth in the sixth beatitude : rj Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
God is pure ; therefore we must be pure, or no 
vision of his radiant person can ever be vouch- 
safed us. j) The character he bids us build up 
in ourselves is indispensable to any sweet in- 
tercourse with him. (That soul whose true 
life is not a partaking of the life of 
hoiy can God, may utter forms of prayer, but it 

have union . • , t ■ i i 

with God. cannot pray ; its suppliant phrases, and 
the glowing rhapsodies with which it 
may charm human ears, do not enter into the 
ear of the Lordjof Sabaoth. There is no 
child's cry in them, and hence they meet no 
answering throb in the Father's heart. 
( But am I not like God ? asks the natural, 
unrenewed man, who thinks that it is 
of nature praying to say prayers.y Yes, God 

no enoug .. m ^ Q ug j n J^g i ma g e • anc [ no amount 

of sinning can quite efface that image from our 
nature. \ But it is only a likeness in our nature, 
not in our character — an essential, not a moral 



20 PR A YER. 

resemblance^ It is involuntary ; something, that 
is, which we cannot help having; it exists 
while we are unconscious of it; nor can it be 
subjected to the dominion of our will. Plainly, 
then, this likeness to God in our nature is not 
that agreement with him which is presupposed 
in the offering of acceptable prayer. V It is 
simply a basis, on which we are to rear 
££. up a holy character for ourselves ; and 
e«e,,t:ai. th j g holy character is what brings us 
into real and blessed intercourse with God; 
There may be a kind of intellectual coming 
to him. and our natural feelings may gush 
forth after him, while there is no true holiness 
of soul ; it does not constitute that free consent 
by which the pure spirit rests in God. There is 
no blending of the human will with the divine, no 
trustfulness, no sweet self-surrender, no giving 
up to the father by the child. Many persons 
are awed bv the attributes of God; they love 

t be bathed in the ocean of his greatness 
and to feel his majesty creeping like a charmed 
shadow upon them. The glory of his creation, 
and the grandeur of his government, make them 



ITS NATURE. 21 

tremble and adore ; and they speak sublimely 
of his goings forth to work wonders 

Intellect- . 

uai excite- m heaven above and the earth beneath, 
notth" So strong is this response in our nature 
spirit of ^ Q t | ie dj v i ne glories, that we may mis- 

praycr. ^ 

take it for genuine adoration of God. 
The poet often thinks that his mental uplifting 
and wondering are a real communion with God. 
He writes lofty hymns of praise, which go doAvn 
through the ages as the outflowing^ of a Chris- 
tian spirit ; yet in it all there may be no loving 
consent and agreement of his will with the will 
of the Most High. - He can turn away from 
his raptures about God, to be affected in the 

same manner by his contemplations 

A praverful ■ i i i • i • • 

spirit dif- amid the beauties and sublimities of 
poetical"™ *he material world. It is not the 
feeling. holiness of God that charms him ? 

and draws him up into an ecstasy ; he loves 
that great Being only as he loves the cataract, 
the Alpine scene, the spangled heavens, or 
the ocean storm.j He takes the poet's pleasure 
in what is grand, or radiant, or majestic, or 
awful, in God and his ways ; but he does not 



22 PRA YER. 

feel the lowly joy of the Christian, who is drawn 
• to God most of all by his holy and compassion- 
ate character, (it is this moral likeness to God, 
built up by ourselves under the movings of 
the Holy Ghost upon that natural likeness in 
which man was created, that renders us in the 
truest sense like our God. Nothing else, how- 
ever pleasing or admirable it may be, can 
fit us for communion with him ; and 
S£ hence it is involved in all the forms of 
And God. true pra y erj as it is the substance and 
X^ soul of a prayerful spirit>|We can pour out 
our souls to God in prayer, and lean upon his 
goodness with a constant and joyous trust, only 
as we like him, — breathing his spirit of holi- 
ness, and filling all our purposes and acts with 
his own perfect love. 

2.( A second element, which enters into the 

very idea and essence of a prayerful 

TZ^l spirit, is the clear apprehension of God 

wliileit as present and near to the praying 

prays. 1 

soul. God is always with us, but we 
are apt to forget this solemn truth. He listens 
to our idle words, he sees our conduct, he knows 



ITS NATURE. 23 

our thoughts. But this nearness and oversight 
are not always kept in mind by us. We go 
on our several ways as if no divine eye were 
looking. We hide iniquity in our hearts, seeming 
not to remember that even they are naked and 
open to Him with whom we have to do. This 
delusion Ave must overcome before we can truly 
pray. Our souls can commune with God onl} r 
as their apprehension of him as a God at hand, 
and not afar off, is clear. That is not a prayer to 
God which we offer with no faith that it enters 
into his ear./ How absurd it would be in us to 
call out for help to a person on-the other side of 
the globe ! ButJ we ask God for help every day. 
We speak to him aloud and in whis- 

Cannot 

address the pers, and we lilt up our hearts to him 
unreal. ° r silently for his blessing; nor do we 
regard this speaking to him as at all 
absurd.,; Do we not, therefore, in form at least, 
assent to the truth that God is with us, giving 
us audience when we come before him in 
prayer ? And what Ave take for granted in 
form, is what there must indeed be in our souls, 
or our utterance is not praying. " Give ear, 



24 PR A YER. 

Shepherd of Israel/' say we, as we stand 
in that august presence. x But if our hearts 
feel not what our lips speak, it is only a solemn 
sound on a thoughtless tongue./ " We cannot 
escape from thy presence, nor go from thy 
Spirit," is the uplifted voice of the congre- 
gation ; but do we, in our public wor- 

What our 

prayers be- ship, apprehend the truth thus con- 
kick the fessed ? If not, there is no seeing 
^ onof of God who stands above us and 

God. 

bends down to our cry ; and hence 
there can be no fellowship with him, no min- 
gling of our spirit with his, nothing which 
answers to the essential idea of prayer. (He 
that cometh to God must believe that God is, 
and that he rewards those who diligently seek 
him. How many times we utter the words of 
prayer when there is no such object of faith 
before us ! We go into our closet and shut 
the door upon the world, but God is not with 
us in our room. We try to recall our mercies 
and our sins, but they appear before us only in 
a confused and partial mannei\ Neither grati- 
tude nor penitence comes at our bidding. If 



Such 
prayers 
mock the 
soul. 



ITS NATURE. 25 

we take the attitude of petition, still the foun- 
tains of feeling are not unloosed, (it is a heart- 
less service, an irksome duty. Christ 
cometh not in through the door to 
feed and refresh our souls. On the 
contrary, if we hear the voice of Christ 
as he stands without and knocks, and admit 
him to actual communion with our spirit, how 
we are lifted up, calmed and refreshed by the 
hour of prayer ! Thus only do we really begin 
to pray, and to feel in ourselves the water which 
Christ gives springing up into everlasting life. 
It is idle in us to spread forth our hands in 
prayer while we have no sense of a present 
Father. We may look towards heaven ; but 
" I will not hear you," saith the Lord ; u yea, 
when ye make many prayers, I will not hear." 
\ There may be reverence of manner, subdued 
tones of voice, much appropriate and touching 
expression. Human feelings may rise up to- 
gether, and all hearts be borne away on one 
wave of sympathy; but there is no coming 
of the soul into God's embrace, where alone 
the answer of peace can be received./ This 



26 PRA YER. 

flow of the natural feelings subsides, and the 

worshipper grows still and calm in spirit, as 

he really prays. How can our souls be 

The calm 

j,n- or agitated while they are conscious 01 

leaning on Hirn who hushes the storm ? 
" I have set the Lord on my right hand ; there- 
fore will I never be moved," said the Psalmist. 
This quietness of the praying heart is not 
stoicism ; it is the peace of God. Like Jacob 
of old, we may be driven away from our home, 
knowing that an enemy seeks our life. We may 
lie down as he did — wanderers, sheltered only 
by the firmanent, making a stone our pillow, the 
cold earth a bed to us in our weariness ; but 
when we remember in whose hand we are, 
and turn over in our mind the truth of 

It makes 

the desert his presence, till he stands out to our 
faith in the glory and blessedness of 
his person, the bended sky becomes to us 
the canopy of the great white throne, and its 
hosts of stars the crowns which are cast at 
Christ's feet. Joining in the worship of the 
hundred and forty-four thousand, we breathe 
our spirit forth with them in prayer to Him 



ITS NATURE. 27 

that sitteth on the throne. The answers of 
God, coming down to us while our requests 
rise to him, are like the angels on the ancient 
ladder ascending and descending ; communion 
with the Father of our spirits makes the des- 
ert a Bethel, and the place of danger and 
gloom is the gate of heaven. ( We may, in 
public or among our friends, offer prayers 
when we have no clear recognition of a pres- 
ent and listening God. We may speak out our 
wants into vacancy, thinking only of the rhe- 
torical beauty of our sentences, or the logical 
arrangement of our thoughts, or whether those 
who join with us are pleased with what we say ; 
but our souls will sink down unrefreshed after 
the exercise : on the other hand, if we come 
in faith to Him who hears prayer, — if we 
forget all else in the eagerness of our souls to 
be poured out into his open heart, — it 

A faulty pit i 

utterance matters not how confused, or how brief. 
thVyeam- P r now stammering our utterance may 
mg heart. ^ e • it will rise with acceptance into 
the ear of the Lord of hosts, and we shall receive 
of his own joy till our joy is full.| It was in vain 



28 PRA YER. 

that the disciples continued toiling and rowing 
while they forgot Him who lay asleep in the 
hinder part of the ship. But when they re- 
membered that he was with them, and called out 
for help to him with a strong and yearning cry, 
the Lord of nature arose and rebuked the wind, 
the majesty of his word hushing the storm 
and subduing the waves to an unwonted calm. 
"^ 3. (One other element essential to the idea of 
true prayer is a feeling of dependence on God. 
It is not enough that our character 

A feeling 

of dcpen- should be like his, and that we should 
M.ni.uto know him as present and listening 
prayer. while we pray ; we must also feel that 

he is immeasurably greater than we, and that 
the sources of our being are in him.j Every one 
grants that such a feeling is involved in all 
honest prayer. We never heartily ask another 
to bestow on us what we believe that our 
own efforts must secure. Herein is the lack 
which spoils very many of our prayers ; wo 
deny in our heart what we say with our 
tongue. There is a form, but while offering it 
we distrust its power. The confesson of de- 



ITS NATURE. 29 

pendence flows on while inwardly there is no 

real trust. Our reliance is upon second causes, 

rather than the great First Cause. These second 

causes are God's instruments ; through 

God often 

hidden by them he works to bless us. They are 
causes. visible and tangible, and we arc in the 

midst of them every day ; while he 
himself is impalpable, unseen save by the eye 
of faith. The spring comes to us fresh and 
smiling, and we see the working of natural 
law in the renewing of the earth's face ; but 
we do not hear the divine voice which recalls 
the sun from his winter journey. We feel 
the solar rays, but not Him who gives them 
their heat — who breathes his own energy into 
them that they may melt the cheerless covering 
of nature. Our God, whom we hear not, and 
whose glory it is to conceal a thing, takes hold 
of these created agents, and through them un- 
looses, with his own hand, the ice-bound waters ; 

he makes soft the earth with showers, 

"Naturai 

forcesnoth- and causes the grass to grow on the 
Qod WtlOU mountains, and the valleys to be cov- 
ered over with corn. So is it in all the 



30 PRA YER. 

processes of nature ; so is it in the small events 
which make up the providential allotments of 
each hour. But we are apt to be absorbed in 
what appears outwardly, to the exclusion of 
Him who works within all objects, processes, 
or events. That omnipotent hand which has 
hold of the whole system of natural appliances 
is hidden from our sight : and we stand in the 
midst of the passive vehicles of God's love, 
saying one to another, " These be thy gods, 
Israel." vThus it is that many persons come 
to worship the creature more than the Creator./ 
The universal frame of nature is their God. 
They worship that which were a dead and 
motionless structure but for Him who is won- 
derful in working ; for as the body without 
the spirit is dead, so nature without God is 
lifeless and unmeaning. This naturalism, of 
which some about us are making their boast, 
puts a great gulf between man and God ; be- 
tween the heavens and Him whose 
worship a glory the heavens declare. It knows 
te°rfeit. 0im " nothing of a supreme Father ; does 
not deign even to ask whether there 



ITS NATURE. 31 

be any God ; locates human wisdom in the 
study of nature, and all happiness in depen- 
dence on nature's laws. The friends of this 
philosophy, as in simple consistency they must, 
deny that there is any power in prayer. They 
have reared up their system to an imposing 
height, and fitly framed it together in all its 
parts ; but they confess that they know not 
on what it stands. There is no recognition 
of the hand which holds the wondrous fabric 
of nature in its grasp. 

f~Now, if we fall under the power of this earthly - 
mindedness, and come to regard all our bless- 
ings as the fruit of our own sagacious use 
of natural forces, — if our sweet slumber, and 
the enlivening air, our daily bread, our friend- 
ships, the riches of this life, and our spiritual 
favors, — seem to us not to come from God, but 
from agents and influences which we may con- 
trol, we cannot offer up our prayers 

Must be 

conscious and thanksgivings to God for all these 
wMehGod mercies. We lack that spirit of a child 
only can which is great in the kingdom of heav- 

supply. ° ° 

en.\ The humble Christian does not 



32 PRA YER. 

despise the means appointed of God for securing 
blessings to men : but he does look beyond these 
means always, not suffering them to obscure his 
view of the supreme and constant love of his 
heavenly Father. Nothing can separate between 
us and him so long as we have in us the essence 
and substance of a praying spirit. Our soul 
stands related to God as a beam of light to the 
sun. Though it warm the earth by its low- 
descending touch, yet it is ever mounting up 
into its great fountain. The human and divine 
meet and mingle. They throb with a single life 
— the life of holiness and love, whose centre 
is God. Their intercourse is unobstructed ; and 
while the spirit of the Father is gushing down- 
ward in heavenly benedictions, the spirit of the 
child is ever rising upward into his bosom in 
trustful and adoring prayer. 

Christian, are you ever dissatisfied with your 
prayers? 0, let not that regret be for the 
reason that your prayers have been imperfect 
in form ; for the reason that you have failed 
to edify a human auditory, or have used broken 
words or sentences which can lay no claim to 



ITS NATURE. 33 

elegance, comprehensiveness of thought, or a 
happy interweaving of incidents and inspired 
texts. Let it be the occasion of your sorrow, 
rather, if you have lacked the essential elements 
of a prayerful spirit ; if you have not any moral 
likeness to Him who is holy, and benevolent, 
and merciful ; if you fail to apprehend God as 
near and listening to you while you 

What we 

should most pray ; if you find it hard to look through 
our pray- a ^ created causes to Him who is the 

Hope and the Helper of the children of 
men(/ylf you are destitute of this inward spirit 
of prayer, your most graceful form of devo- 
tion is but as the marble statue) of an angel, 
cold and motionless ;y but if your soul is in 
fellowship with God after the manner I have 

here sought to impress, even the rudest 
spirit win form of speech shall be a living seraph, 

make the ■> -x n , i 

form. bearing you away upward from the 

care and turmoil of this world, to be 
rested and refreshed in the arms of that love 
which is from everlasting to everlasting. \ 
3 ' 



34 PRA YER. 



CHAPTER II. 

FORMS OF PRAYER. 

We love to give expression to our strong feel- 
ings and thoughts. Whatever ma)- the mood or 
sentiment swelling within our mind, we seek to 
utter it in words which shall return it to us 
audibly through the ear, or we strive to embody 
it in artistic forms and colors, which give it back 
through the ministry of the eye. This embody- 
ing of our inward states of soul makes them 
real and impressive to us. They are thereby 
made to stand out vividly to our memory and 
in our consciousness. Our emotions are greatly 
increased, both in fullness and power, by these 
outward embodiments ; they speak back to the 
soul with a marvellous sympathy; they re-echo 
^o it its deepest and most sacred self-commun- 
ings. Raffaelle labored to express his dream 



ITS FORMS. 35 

of beauty ; his nature demanded it of him ; he 

could not help being the great artist that he was. 

Love of scientific truth was a passion 

Mental 

states seek in Galileo, and it was impossible for 

a body. 

him not to utter that passion ; though 
the terrors of the Inquisition hung over him, 
they failed to keep him silent. It is a common 
remark that, while many men have been able 
to write no book, few men have been able to 
write only one book. The more one publishes 
his thoughts, the stronger is the impulse to keep 
on publishing them. The expression given to 
a single thought reacts on the mind to awaken 
other thoughts. The longer a preacher of the 
gospel continues to preach, the harder is it for 
him to cease from preaching. The more Luther 
meditated, the more urgent were his thoughts 
to be spoken ; and therefore he could not keep 
still before the Imperial Diet, though he took his 
life in his hand. Paul longed to preach Christ : 
it was his one burning and soul-filling desire ; 
and therefore it was not possible for him to be 
silent. " Necessity is laid upon me ; yea, woe 
is me if I preach not the gospel," he exclaims. 



36 PR A YER. 

When Jesus rode in triumph into Jerusalem, the 
multitude, being full of a grateful joy, praised 
God, saying, " Blessed is he that cometh in the 
name of the Lord." It was in vain that the 
Pharisees rebuked the people. The very stones 
would have cried out had man kept silent in 
such an hour. Trying to stay that gush of joy 
was like commanding a river to flow upward to 
its source. The authors of the Psalms were men 
of prayer ; David especially lived a life of com- 
munion with God, and hence almost all his 
writings are prayers — external forms 
formTof and embodiments of this inward habit. 
praycr ' The spirit of prayer in him did not 
need to be goaded to an expression of itself; it 
flowed out spontaneously and irresistibly. If 
he strove to be silent he was burdened with 
longing; his bones wasted away under the re- 
straint thus laid on him. 

Perhaps no brighter instance of the impulse 
Theory of a prayerful spirit to seek expres- 
ofDaniei. gion can be f oun a than is brought to 
our notice in the story of Daniel. By the con- 
trivance of certain envious courtiers a decree 



ITS FORMS. 37 

had been issued, having special reference to 
this godly captive, ordering that prayer should 
be made to no being but Darius in his kingdom. 
Should any one be detected breaking this de- 
cree, he was to be thrown to the lions — the 
most frightful and ignominious of punishments. 
Daniel might have prayed secretly and inaudibly 
without being found out; but this was not his 
custom, nor did it agree with his convictions of 
duty. He could show a nobler trust in God, 
and more fully unburden his heart by speaking 
audibly; nor might he hope that his prayer 
would enter into the divine ear if he allowed 
himself to be controlled by any fear of man. 
Therefore, although he knew that the writing 
was signed, — his death-warrant if he persisted 
in praying, — he went into his house, boldly 
opened the windows, kneeled upon his knees 
three times a day, and prayed and gave thanks 
to God as aforetime. 

From the case of Daniel, then, and from the 
other examples and illustrations just given, we 
infer that forms of prayer are a necessity to the 
praying soul. That soul must speak forth its 



38 PRA YER. 

inward state — an inward state which consists 
in likeness of character to God, a clear appre- 
hension of the presence of God, and a sense of 
loving dependence on God.-* The nature, of a 
prayerful spirit, as thus briefly defined, indi- 
cates in what ways and forms it may most 
properly indulge the impulse which 
determine it feels to seek outward expression. 
forms of Bearing in mind the universal law of 



i & 



prayer. 



speech, that it should correspond to 
the feeling or thought which it embodies, we 
are prepared to consider some of the methods 
by which the praying soul may give utterance 
to its longings. 

1. The first and most natural way in which a 
prayerful spirit utters itself, especially if its 
burden be very great and urgent, is by ejacu- 

latory prayer. This form of prayer has 

Ejacula- 

tory some peculiar advantages ; it may be 

used in the midst of peril and confu- 
sion. It is a momentary act. In such utterances 
the hard-pressed soul gathers itself into a short, 
sharp cry, and so is hurled, as by an in- 

* See previous chapter. 



ITS FORMS. 39 

stantaneous impulse, into the arms of its God. 
This form of prayer, though so befitting the 
sudden exigencies of our lives, is susceptible 
of many perversions and of very great abuse. 
Those who practise it too freely may fall into 
the habit of irreverent and profane exclamations 
before they are aware. These pious ejaculations 
are suited only to a prayerful spirit ; and if ut- 
tered when no heavy burden is crushing the soul 
down, they are too intense to be true. Yet how 
common are these exclamations, even among 
ungodly men ! It is a fact worthy of our most 
serious study that what we call profane language 
grows out of the same want in human nature as 
Abuse of ^ ne habit of prayer ; the blasphemies of 
this form. ghimei and the prayers of David have 
but one natural root. There is a feeling of de- 
pendence on God planted in all human hearts ; 
and when that feeling is suddenly aroused in any 
one, his first impulse is to call on the name of 
God. With the irreligious person as with the 
religious, this calling upon God may grow to be a 
habit ; and so, whatever the passion which moves 
him, — though a storm of anger, as it is most 



40 PRA YER. 

likely to be, — he utters it in words sacred to 
prayer. Hence the profaneness, the sacrilege 
which shocks our souls. He acts under the 
natural impulse of a wicked heart ; there are in 
him none of the elements of character and feeling 
which all true prayer involves. He makes the 
channel of divine communion a vehicle for 
his earthly passion; it is as though the Sab- 
bath were changed to a holiday, or the tem- 
ple of God were used for a playhouse. His 
language might be prayer if it came from a 
heart right with God ; but falling as it does 
from sinful lips, the stain of blasphemy is upon 
it. Do not fail to mark the fact here brought 
out, dear reader, if you are ever tempted to 
the careless use of words and phrases which 
are sacred. Your evil habit proves 

Debases 

what is best to you that you have an instinctive 

in man. , 

feeling of dependence on God. It is 
also your noblest feeling, since by it you come 
into communion with God : what shame and re- 
morse therefore should fill you if you have made 
this high capacity do the work of your worst 
and lowest impulses ! 



ITS FORMS. 41 

No one should be so bold as to use this form 
of prayer who is not sure that he has the love 
of God in his heart; nor he even, save when, 
with a spirit which can say, " Thy will be done," 
he leaps upward, out of the reach of some pur- 
suing terror, to embrace the knees of the Eter- 
nal King who alone can deliver him. Whoever 
hurls forth these emotional phrases without any 
sense of the divine presence, and of his own 
utter dependence on God, does not pray ; he 
simply uses vain repetitions, such as our Sa- 
viour warns us against. Prayerful ejac- 

When 

ejacuiatory ulations are fit only for the soul which 
proper "* some mighty emotion has heaved up 
and cast at the very footstool of God. 
It is they that are hunted for their lives who 
may venture to cry out with David, " Awoke for 
me, Lord." There was no blasphemy in the 
tongue of the publican; for he smote on his 
breast in guilty grief, and out of a heart torn 
by remorse, cried, " God be merciful. 7 ' " My 
God, art thou dead ? " was the wild cry of Lu- 
ther's heart once, as he lost the sense of God's 
presence in the midst of his enemies. Such 



42 PR A YER. 

expressions as these are not the vehicles to 
which the praying soul resorts in its calm and 
unimpassioned hours; it chooses gentler wings 
on which its quiet thoughts may soar. But 
when these intense words burst like red-hot 
balls out of hearts rent by the tumult of an- 
guish and despair, then we may believe that 
they are true to the inner yearnings of God ! s 
struggling child, and that they are not more 
swift to reach his throne than are his fatherly 
compassions to fly downward for our relief. 

2. But these sudden bursts of emotion do not 
realize the idea of communion with God. They 
are only momentary infoldings of God's love. 
They do not satisfy the praying soul, which 
longs for quiet retreats, where it may nestle 
in the everlasting arms. Hence the habit of 
secret secret prayer. A truly devotional 

prayer. f ra me will take this form as natu- 

rally as a tree sends out its roots by the river. 
Secret prayer has ever been a delight to holy 
men. Every day has brought them to its blessed 
observance, and they have come from it with 
radiant faces. It is true that many professing 



ITS FORMS. 43 

Christians have no closet, but such are not the 
victorious and rejoicing children of God. It is 
the unquickened, earth-bound soul to which this 
frequent retirement is a drudgery and form. He 
goes into the secret place having no lively fel- 
lowship with Christ. He does not walk and talk 
with God, and therefore fails to find him in the 
cool of the day. There is no breathing upward 
of his spirit through the reverent words which 
he utters into the dear heart of a pres- 

Why neg- 
lected by ent and loving Father. The prayer is 

many. 

empty and worthless because it is not 
born of a praying spirit. Those affections which 
should be growing up around Christ and taking 
hold of God, are earth-clinging and prone. No 
wonder that such an one comes from his closet 
unrefreshed. He lacks a prayerful spirit — the 
first prerequisite to all living forms of prayer. 
Those who refuse to pray save as it suits their 
feelings, and who therefore have no stated times 
for prayer, should remember that it is possible 
for them to feel at all times like praying. This 
lack of feeling or impulse never comes in to 
fret the soaring and prevailing soul. He is 



44 PR A YER. 

always ready for his hours of converse with 
God, and meets them with a deepening thirst 
for the water of life. They are channels open- 
ing upward, through which the longings of his 
heart flow into the love of God. So far are 
they from putting the least check on his free- 
dom that they alone are able to make him free 
indeed. His soul would be cramped and sad 
but for this opportunity to open itself to its 
incoming God. Whoever has true spiritual life 
dwelling in him and filling him is not 
Howto sorrowful, but more pleased the oftener 

make our 

closets a ^ G mav give that life an outflow, or 
feel it enlarged by the shedding abroad 
in him of the divine spirit. Like the thirsty 
traveller, he does not murmur because drink- 
ing fountains occur at regular intervals along 
the road. He is glad to know beforehand at 
just what places he may rest and be refreshed. 
Regularity is not wearisome, but welcome, in the 
doing of what we love to do. The spirit of prayer 
is the great need. Having that, the more the 
occasions for uttering it, the greater our joy. It 
is in his closet, alone with God, that the Chris- 



ITS FORMS. 45 

tian burnishes his armor. His spirit is there 
bathed and warmed in the sunlight of its Fa- 
ther's love. He pours forth his wants without 
any reserve. None of them are too trivial for 
Him without whom not a sparrow falleth on the 
Freedom of ground. His whole soul is laid open 
to God, and he prays and makes 
confession with a fullness unsuited to any 
place less secluded. It was this basking in 
the radiance of God that made the faces of 
the prophets shine. Elijah came out of the 
secret place of the Most High to work won- 
ders in the sight of Israel. David remembered 
God in the night watches, and prevented the 
morning with his supplications. The witnesses 
to the power of secret prayer to lift up and in- 
spire men cannot be counted for num- 
Jes to its ber. 1^ is the Christian's vital breath, 
precious- 0nly ag he pra y S does he live the 

life which Christ brought to our world. 
The blessed Son of God himself even was de- 
pendent on his private devotions. If the peo- 
ple thronged him through the day, so that he 
could not be alone, he would go away upon the 



46 PRA YER. 

mountains in the night time, and there have his 
hours of intercourse with God. Our souls re- 
new their youth in this calm and still fellowship. 
They are made to leap with a more intense life 
by the flowing into them of the life of God till 
their very substance throbs and leaps with a 
joy which they cannot tell. 

3. Another form in which the spirit of prayer 

tends to utter itself is public and social prayer. 

A new element here comes into the 

Public and 

social exercise. It is not for him who prays, 

alone, but for those also whom he asks 
to pray with him. At first thought it seems 
almost presumptuous to attempt to give voice 
to the wants of a large company of worshippers. 
But the true Christian often finds more comfort 
in the prayers of another than in his own. This 
fact should encourage us, though we may be 
able to offer only what seem to us very imper- 
fect public pravers. The young dis- 

A difficulty < * . . 

to be over- ciple who sits down after this exercise 

almost mortified by the thought that 

no one has been edified, is often mistaken. He 

does not know how the maturest and most in- 



ITS FORMS. 47 

telligent Christians love his simple and child- 
like prayers. We should take care, however, 
in overcoming this hinderance to public prayer, 
not to fall into its peculiar temptation. That 
temptation is to forget the God in whose pres- 
ence we stand, and make our prayer solely for 
human ears. Thus our utterance ceases to be 
prayer, and is changed into a mere harangue, 
whose solemn tone is an offence to God. He 
who leads in the service of public prayer should 
bear in mind that many hearts are sending up 
Ambitious requests to God through his utterance, 
prayers. j^ q g n0 uld usc that plain and simple 
language which is becoming in them. They all 
speak to God in his words, and it is the prayer 
of the humble that God does not despise. We 
honor the greatness of God by speaking to him 
as little children, since our sublimest speech 
can never agree with his infinite majesty. I 
am disposed to favor the wise use of written 
or printed forms in public prayer. Though the 
pulpit should use them only sparingly, as may 
tend most to edification in any case, I should 
be glad to hear them used often in the social 



48 PRA YER ' 



meeting, especially by those who d.strust their 
own powers. The young Christian often finds 
it a sore trial to rise up before us and pray. 
Let him, therefore, procure a volume of printed 
prayers. In these we can join with him tul 
he gets used to the sound of his own 
S^b. voice; till he acquires confidence and 
es.en.pora- . posse ssion, and is so at home in 

~ the service as to be able to trust his 

raided efforts. If our young brethren whom 
we love all the more for being easfiy abashed, 
would follow out this suggestion, I am per- 
suaded that it would give us a much larger 
number of praying men in the church hau we 
n0 w have. Familiarity with the Scriptures, 
. great help in public to those who would clothe 
their prayers in reverent and appeahng forms. 
tZj> familiarity with the Scriptures," forth, 
Bible imagery should come to the prayingsou 
unsought. We cease to pray as we 
2£T struggle for it, and fall into the intellec- 
tual effort of trying to remember what 
we have half forgotten. It is better that we 
should not quote God's words to him when we 



ITS FORMS. 49 

go before him in prayer, than that our souls should 
fail to come sweetly and lovingly into his em- 
brace. An uttered form of words to which we 
apply the term " eloquent " can hardly be a true 
prayer. Its fault is in calling attention to itself, 
and to the person who makes it. The fact that 
there is a mercy-seat, before which we have 
bowed together, is the one grand impression 
which a public prayer should leave. As the 
disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration lifted 
up their eyes and saw no man save Jesus only, 
so should it be with us after the devotions of 
the house of God; we should meet our divine 
Father in them, and forget both our- 
be° exalted selves and him who leads in our 
in public prayers. It is a wrong to us, and 

prayer. 

a sin against God, when the minister 
or other person tries, under the pretence of 
praying for us, to see how much he can work 
upon our feelings, or how much admiration he 
may beget in us for himself. The worst abuse 
of public prayer is that which makes it a means 
of giving rebuke or advice to a fellow-man. 
Yet some of the most eminent and godly men 
4 



50 PRA YER. 

have been guilty of this sin, and owe their fame 
largely to the skill with which they have lashed 
other men in their prayers. Many a prayer, 
so called, has been purely a homily, 
prayers or a cloak of malice and cowardice, 
should not It hag served as the covering of an 

preach. ° 

invidious thrust ; things were hinted 
which the speaker dared not say in honest 
fashion ; he gave advice, he criticised, he found 
fault, he flattered or condemned, in the name 
of prayer to God. I am at loss whether most 
to despise the meanness or abhor the impiety 
of this abuse ; it is sacrilege towards God and 
pusillanimity towards our fellow-men. The wor- 
shipper in the public or social meeting has a 

right to demand that whoever speaks 

What each 

worshipper for him before God should speak as 

may claim. 

it becomes his own heart to pray ; 
that his words come forth from a loving and 
lowly heart, and that they be addressed to Him 
who pities our frailty and our sin. This, and 
nothing else, though it be neither elegant nor 
flowing in language, is true public prayer. 
Thus standing and speaking, no one need fear 



ITS FORMS. 51 

about the form of his petitions. He who can- 
not join with such a leader, however faulty his 
utterance, shows that he has not the spirit of 
prayer in him. It is a blessed relief and re- 
freshment to the devout soul to turn from the 
rolling diction of the self-conscious pedant and 
be borne upward on the outpourings of unlet- 
tered faith. Better were it for all Christians that 
they should never learn to reason like the sage 
than that they should forget to pray like the child. 
4. There is one other form of prayer most 
grateful to the human heart, arising out of that 
mysterious sympathy which there is between 
our feelings and certain musical sounds. 

Music may 

be a form of Any sweet note, if it be prolonged, 

prayer. 

will cause some chord withm us to 
vibrate responsively ; and when several such 
melodies are combined into a harmony, their 
subtile power is still more subduing. Not all 
musical sounds are devotional. Some of them 
excite ludicrous rather than reverent emotions. 
They all have their examples in nature. The 
babbling of the brook and noisy chirping of 
the birds dispose one to cheerfulness and gayety; 



52 PR A YER. 

it is their tendency to drive away from us any 
solemn thought. All complicated, curious sounds 
affect us in like manner. They do not leave the 

mind to its own musings, but draw off 
daren't it s attention to themselves. A praying 
nature * B P"*it * s most pleased with the simple, 

low, and deep-toned voices of nature. 
The soft moaning of the mountain pine, the 
whispering of the leafy elms, the solemn voice 
which comes in from the sea, agree with it, and 
lend it wings. Philosophy cannot tell how it is 
that one class of sounds fills us with laughter, 
while another class makes us sober even to 
tears. It js a mystery. We know only the 
fact, and from it we may learn valuable lessons. 
The power of different kinds of music to awaken 
diverse feelings teaches us what to do if we 
would stir any given feeling in our hearts. A 
skilful choir of singers can sway an audience 

to any mood. It is in their power, by 

A power 

for good or a few well-aimed measures, to deepen, 

change, destroy, or utterly reverse a 

present emotion. This susceptibility of men to 

music is what makes it a power, either for good 



ITS FORMS. 53 

or evil, in public worship. Especially may it 
help in giving utterance to the spirit of prayer. 
We know that our thoughts become clearer to 
us as we write them out, yet more impressive 
if that writing be given back to us by a human 
voice, more impressive still if the writing thus 
spoken be in the poetic form ; but the deep 
thoughts of our hearts are never fully uttered, 
nor do they reach the climax of their power, 
till they are taken up on the wings of holy 
song. Every assembly of worshippers proves 
this. From the earliest ages of the world music 
has found its noblest home in God's temples. 
Yet all music is not sacred. The ser- 

Seeular 

and sacred vice of song in the Lord's courts, like 
that of speaking and teaching, has its 
limits. The preacher cannot treat all subjects. 
Many thoughts occur to him which he values 
very highly ; but if true to his office, he will 
leave them out of his sermons. They would 
not deepen those religious convictions which 
it is his business to make ; therefore they do 
not belong to the sphere of the pulpit, but to 
the secular assembly, the platform, the hall of 



54 PRA YER- 

common debate. In this respect the preacher 
has occasion to die daily, as he ought to, for 
he is sent to preach Christ, not his own wisdom. 
His displays of smartness and startling origi- 
nality, being out of place in God's house, must 
occur elsewhere. But preaching is no more 
limited than sacred music. That word " sacred " 
should stand out in large letters, as applied to 
all the services of the sanctuary. Music is a 
language. It may be the language of mirth. 
Sometimes it expresses nothing but the inge- 
nuity of the musician. Often it embodies only 
natural emotions. But in the sanctuary it is 
sacred ; it is set apart from all other uses to the 
purposes of religious worship ; there, 
fibimyof before God, it should ever be the lan- 
church guage of devotion, the vehicle of divine 
communion, the voice of prayer. Bear 
in mind that I use the word " prayer " in its 
broadest sense, to denote any form of utterance 
through which the soul addresses itself to God. 
It includes praise, adoration, confession, or any- 
thing else entering into this essential idea. 
Now, what I insist upon in regard to sacred 



ITS FORMS. 55 

music is, that the praying soul shall find in it 
a voice suited to become the voice of prayer. 
The limits of sacred music have not been guard- 
ed more than those of sacred eloquence. There 
are hymns in some of our collections which 
ought never to be read in the temple of 
prayer. As of hymns so also of tunes. We 
cannot so sing all of them as to be thereby 
drawn upward from ourselves and the world 
into God's embrace ; they are not a proper 
vehicle for either our prayers or our praises. 
Other tunes, verv faulty it may be, 

The voice 

of a devout if judged solely by artistic standards, 
being full of a devotional spirit, are 
sung on from age to age, growing dearer and 
dearer to the heart of the church, despite all 
the criticisms of connoisseurs. No one should 
be regarded who complains that his taste as an 
artist is not met in the songs of the sanctuary. 
Those songs are prayers. It is enough if they 
touch the springs of faith, and if our souls may 
rise upon them to the down-coming love of our 
God. Art may do its utmost, but this element 
should not be left out or obscured. 



56 PRA YER. 

How wonderful this sensitiveness of the soul 
to music ! Its holiest emotions, its repentances, 
its adoration, its prayers, its trust, its praises 
may rise up to God through inarticulate har- 
monies. We have it in our power to be always 
furnished with this voice for the inner wants 
of the spirit. The music of the ocean is not 
always low and solemn; the storm lashes it to 
fury, and its voice is lifted up wrathfully on 
high. The winds do not always whisper gently 
among the trees, but often rush madly forth 
from their prison, and fill the sky with angry 
screams. But we can subject this spirit and 
breath of nature to our control. We 

Art may 

control na- can shut up the soul of harmony in our 

ture. . . 

musical instruments, and m the powers 
of the human voice, and attune it to the deep 
and tender feelings with which we should come 
before God. Thus it is when articulate words 
fail us that we shall not lack the means of pour- 
ing out our hearts in prayer. The longing of 
the human soul for God, being touched by the 
subtile wand of harmony, may rise to our refuge 
and our rest. 



ITS FORMS. 57 

It is sweet to talk with God in silent prayer ; 
a relief to cry out to him for help in sudden 
peril ; blessed to go away and find him alone in 
our closet when we have shut the door, strength- 
ening to stand up and speak forth the yearnings 
of many hearts in audible tones. But when a 
perfect organ stirs the sleeping echoes 
foimof * °f som e ancient tune set to words which 
public Christians of remote ages chanted along: 

prayer. ° o 

its royal notes, and an according choir 
swells and articulates the full tide of sound, 
while the voices of a vast congregation, rising 
up like mighty waters, lift the soul heavenward, 
then it is inspiring and enrapturing to pray. 
The good of many generations stand about us 
and join their voice to ours. Every Christian 
heart is melted, and every individual will wafted 
forth upon the gush of holy desire. Nor do the 
strains seem to die as they fade away upward 
one after another, but are still audible to our 
listening faith, blending in the song which goeth 
up forever before the throne. 



58 PR A YER. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE OBJECTS OF PRAYER. 

Those of us who are trying to live a life of 
prayer are often thrown into doubt, as St. Paul 
intimates that he sometimes was, concerning the 
specific objects for which it is proper that we 
should pray. This doubt is so great at times 
as to be a hinderance to prayer. We fear to 
go before God and give our longings a 

Doubtful- . 

nessof free voice, lest we should ask for what 
God cannot wisely give. He knows, 
better than ourselves, what we need, and what 
any others, for whom we are burdened, may 
need. It seems to us like doubting the omnis- 
cience of God and his infinite love, to be par- 
ticular and definite in our requests. Do we 
not sometimes come from the mercy- seat fear- 
ing that we have prayed for objects which might 



ITS OBJECTS. 59 

harm us, or be contrary to the counsels of 
eternal widom, if bestowed? Shall we keep 
on crying to God for the things which, we 
are half persuaded, ought to be withheld ? Here 
is a constantly recurring perplexity in the life 
of prayer. " We know not what to pray for as 
we ought ; " and we should be tempted to cease 
praying, in any specfic way, were we not as- 
sured that u the Spirit maketh intercession for 
us." 

The trial of many Christians is not that they 
have no communion with God : their intercourse 
with him is such that they are all the time 
in a calm and heavenly frame ; not that they 
are unconscious of inner wants which his full- 
ness alone can supply ; not that they are averse 
to the practice of private, social, or public 
prayer : it is their trial that, in their manifold 

relations to God and one another, and 
a frequent Qxmdi the complex interests of life, they 

know not what blessings would be ac- 
cording to God's will, and in the end for their 
own best good. The befitting forms of prayer 
we learn from the occasions on which we 



60 PRA YER. 

make them. A sudden impulse of fear or 
hope, a shock of grief or joy, is the occasion 
for ejaculatory prayer. The daily wants of the 
Christian call him into the secret place where 
he is alone with God. Public prayer is the 
natural result of our fellowship as churches, 
and of our working together under Christ for 
the good of the world. 

But though full of a praying spirit, and trying 
to pray always as the occasion requires, the voice 
of prayer yet falters on the lips of many Chris- 
tians, for the reason given by St, Paul : " We 
know not what we should pray for." The form 
is well enough, but are the particular requests 
such as we ought to make ? We doubt our 
ability to judge what would be best in the 
exigency ; and this doubt deepens till we pray 
but hesitatingly, and without assurance, or re- 
solve to cease praying altogether. The grand 
remedy, to which we should ever hasten when 
this perplexity is upon us, is the truth that the 
The grand blessed Comforter prays for us. He 
rehef. - g j n ^ e groanings which we cannot 

utter. He breathes our sense of want into 



ITS OBJECTS. 61 

the heart of the Father. We need not hesi- 
tate, but may speak freely whatever longings 
crowd to our lips ; for he prays through our 
prayers, graciously dropping out of them what- 
ever is faulty, and presenting, in his golden 
censer, only so much as accords with the good 
will of God concerning us. 

The assurance that the Spirit helpeth our 
infirmities is, then, the blessed argument with 
which we may ever quiet our misgiving hearts. 
Still, we should be glad to lessen those in- 
firmities, or be rid of them, as much 

The wish to . , 

beridot as possible. It is proper in us to 
desire that we may be perfect in our 
supplications. We would know what we ought 
to pray for, as well as that the Spirit helps 
us when we pray for what we ought not. How 
can we obtain this knowledge ? Are there 
any metes and bounds by which we may keep 
our steps ? Have any marks or tests been 
given us by which we may know what things 
we ought to pray for? How can we keep 
ourselves from asking of God what he cannot 
wisely grant? 



62 PRA YER. 

I venture a few remarks on these questions, 
not in the hope of answering them, but of re- 
lieving the Christian hearts which so often are 
burdened with them. The trial of knowing 
but in part what to pray for, must be ours till 
we know as we are known. Yet will 
tws wish in it minister freedom to us in praying, to 
know as much as we can of the proper 
objects and bounds of this holy exercise. 

1. We are warranted in praying, I think, 
for anything which God has declared 

Proper to 

pray for that he will bring to pass. I know 
hasVoni- that in saying this I meet what is 
perhaps the most common objection to 
all our prayers. " Why," it is urged, " should 
we pray for that which is sure to take place 
in virtue of the declared will of God?" For 
me it is a sufficient answer to this, that God 
a common uses our prayers among the means by 

objection. which he ig p l eased tQ f ulfil nig coun . 

sels. Such indeed is the scriptural reply. In 
speaking of the return of his ancient people 
from captivity, God says, "I the Lord have 
spoken it and will do it, yet will I be inquired 



ITS OBJECTS. 63 

of by the house of Israel to do it for them." 
Daniel, we find, did not remit prayer, but 
prayed more earnestly for the escape of the 
Jews from Babylon, when he knew the fact 
and the exact time of their release. As soon 
as he knew that God had willed the rebuilding 
of Jerusalem, he set his face unto the Lord 
God with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes ; 
and he prayed, saying, " I beseech thee, let 
thine anger be turned away from thy 

The scrip- 
tural an- city Jerusalem, thy holy mountain, and 

cause thy face to shine upon thy sanc- 
tuary that is desolate." This is but one of 
a great many examples, partly in the Old Tes- 
tament and partly in the New, where inspired 
men cried earnestly to God for blessings which 
they knew he would bestow. 

If any turn from Scripture to our weak 
human reason, and say that we need not be 
careful to pray, since God decrees the prayers 
as well as the objects for which they are made, 
then he has left the particular question of 
prayer, and opened the whole subject of man's 
agency as related to God's sovereign control. 



64 PRA YER. 



He takes the ground that man is altogether 
irresponsible for the working out of the divine 
plans. All events are purposed of God,— 
those for which we labor, no less than 
ofTe^T those for which we pray. What we 
witTscX- hall eat and drink, and wherewithal 

ture. 

we shall be clothed; every success 
or failure in life ; the angry and the kind words 
which we speak; the blows and the chanties 
dealt out to our fellow-men; the overthrow of 
kingdoms and the falling of the hunted spar- 
row, are events which enter into the eternal 
counsels: yet we know that none of these 
things come to pass without the free action 
of the human will. If he is beside himself 
who refuses to plant since God has said that 
the harvest shall not fail, then is he bes.de 
himself who says that prayer is useless smce 
the things for which we pray are a 
Theowcc- f q d>8 pi an- This objection, 

tionspecu- V al " " c . , , . 

1Mive - we are to notice, is not practical, but 

purely theoretical. It does not grow out of 
our common sense, or way of dealing with 
affairs of present moment to us, but out of 



ITS OBJECTS. 65 

our metaphysics ; it is a child of the specula- 
tive faculty in us. That all events are from 
eternity certain we know from the nature of 
God, from the teachings of his word, from 
the convictions of our own minds ; and we 
also know, from the same sources, that many 
of these events will not take place without 
the intervention of our own free choices and 
agency. Practically there is no conflict in 
the case, though we may puzzle ourselves with 
the theory of it till we lose all heart either 
for. prayer or labor. We are between the two 
sides of an archway, whose summit is wrapped 
in darkness. That the sides meet and 

Disappears 

in practice, support each other somewhere above 
us we know, for they both stand firm ; and while 
the theorist sits still, complaining that he cannot 
see where they come together, the earnest 
soul moves on under their strong protection 
to the triumph and crown before him. 

It is certain that all forms of error, wrong, 

and sin shall come to an end in the world ; 

God has purposed and foretold the universal 

triumph of good over evil; yet the devout 

5 



00 PRA YER. 

heart is not thereby kept from praying for 
the blessed reign of love. We pray for what 
we know is sure to come, and our prayers ani- 
mate us to struggle against the many 

Examples. OO O J 

evils about us, and so we become a 
part of the means by which God gradually 
works out his own holy counsels. We ask God 
to overrule all great movements among men 
and nations for the bulding-up of his kingdom, 
though he has assured us that he will thus 
use them. We lift up our cry to God, beseech- 
ing that the wrath of man may praise him ; nor 
does the voice of our prayer falter, but rise 
with a stronger faith, when we remember that 
he has purposed what we pray for. Our 
prayers are not out of place because the thing 
prayed for is sure to come : they are natural ; 
we cannot repress them, and our souls live by 
them. 

Many prayers are offered which I am sure 
no one would dare to offer but for the certainty 
that the things prayed for will come to pass. 
Some of the prayers recorded in the Bible 
are of this class. Look especially at the im- 



ITS OBJECTS. 67 

precatory Psalms. Why did David dare to pray, 
as he did, for the destruction of his enemies? 
If he had not known the purpose of God con- 
cerning them, his language might show a vin- 
dictive, revengeful, and even cruel 

Impre- 7 ° 7 

catory spirit. But he was a man after God's 

Psalms. , ". ' ' 

own heart. He was inspired to fore- 
see how God would deal with the wicked. It 
was his devotion to the will of God, and eager- 
ness to see that will done, as he knew it would 
be sooner or later, which caused him to speak 
so terribly against the impious. He was not 
inhuman or merciless in his desires, so long 
as he but acquiesced in the declared purposes 
of God. 

If we ought not to pray for events which 
are sure to take place, we ought not to pray 
for the conversion of the world to Christ. 
The kingdom of our Lord is destined to fill 
the earth ; all other kingdoms shall be absorbed 
into it. It shall spread like leaven in human 
society, till the whole is leavened. Christ shall 
have the heathen for his inheritance ; his ban- 
ner shall float over all lands ; every knee shall 



68 PRA YER. 

bow to him ; the glory of the millennial morn- 
ing is on its way to us. It is fixed by the 
decree of God that swords shall be 

Whatfol- . 

lows if we beaten into ploughshares, that the lion 
Tray for sna ^ eat grass as the ox, that the leop- 

thingsdo- ard ghall lie d()Wn with the kid and 

creed. 

the wolf with the lamb, and that a 
little child shall lead them. The blessed state 
to which this beautiful imagery points us is 
predetermined of God. He will bring it to 
pass after his own eternal purpose. We know 
that this promise of God is sure. Yet we do 
not pray falteringly, but more freely and ear- 
nestly, on account of our knowledge. Our faith 
already sees the heavenly ages which are com- 
ing ; and this " substance of things hoped for " 
only makes us the more instant in prayer, 
and all labors of love, and long-suffering, and 
patience. 

Christ declares that the souls which have 
believed on his name dwell in perpetual safety. 
This we know. The Father has given them to 
him, and he is engaged to keep the least and 
feeblest of them all ; they are his, and nothing 



ITS OBJECTS. 69 

shall be able to pluck them out of his hand. 
Yet where were our comfort, under the daily 
sense of want and weakness, if we were not 
free to ask God to keep us, to uphold our 
goings, to pardon and cleanse us, to save us 
from wandering, to bring our unsteady 

Christian ° 7 ° J 

persever- feet into the city built of gold ? It is 
the will of Christ that all whom the 
Father has given him should be with him where 
he is, that they may behold the glory which 
he had before the world was. But this will 
of his does not hush the cry of our yearning 
spirits. It makes us bold to utter forth our 
longings ; to venture near in strong supplica- 
tion, and plead that the will of Christ may be 
perfected in us. We should languish, and 
consume away in soul, if forbidden to ask G-od 
for the glory he has promised us. The vic- 
tories of the church and the joys of 
Jrace! 7 ^ heaven, although made sure to us by 
the word of God, are not objects in 
which we have no present concern. Our 
prayers and good works enter into the provi- 
dential means by which they are to be secured. 



70 



PR A YER. 



Not without us, entering into his own mind and 
will by the appointed way, which is prayer, will 
God bring them to pass. He declares unto 
us what shall be in the end of the world, not 
to repress our zeal and longings, but that the 
life of prayer in us may unfold more vig- 
orously, in hope of the glory of God. 

2. Another class of objects, which it seems 
to me that we may properly pray for, is all 
those which we feel would be agreeable to 
the divine will, but which God has not fore- 
told as certain. This remark brings us upon 
the plane of our most usual prayers. It would 
be agreeable to the will of God that 
wouTd hon- every soul which hears the gospel, 
IS,, on any given Sabbath, should believe 
certain, an . qj^ t . an( j therefore we may pray 

object of i 

prayer. for that reS ult, though by no means 
sure of it, but the rather of its opposite. In 
the cases just considered, the objects to be 
prayed for were both desirable in themselves 
and sure to be reached ; in the cases to which 
we now come, the element of future certainty 
is taken away. Only the desirableness remains. 



ITS OBJECTS. 71 

In themselves the objects would be for the 
glory of God ; and therefore we may pray 
for them, though God, for the sake of some 
higher glory which they would prevent, may 
withhold them. No preacher of the gospel is 
sure that all who hear him will repent and 
believe ; yet he knows that the honor of Christ 
would be promoted by their so doing, and 
hence he is all the time beseeching God that 
this great blessing may come upon them. When 
a measure of national policy is about to be 
taken up, in manifest opposition to the king- 
dom of Christ, no soul of godly citizens can 
fail to be lifted in prayer against it. The 
more likely any great public wrong is to be 
done, the sweeter the incense of our prayers 
for its prevention, while they go up from true 
and earnest hearts. The world is full of this 
class of occasions for prayer. We cannot look 

on any side of us without seeing much 
Sts*™" which we know that God abhors, yet 

which he may suffer to continue on, 
despite all our prayers and efforts to the con- 
trary. Suppose the case of a man in power, — 



72 PRA YER. 

president, king, emperor. He is not an earnest 
follower of Christ. If he were, he might 
be a great helper in our Lord's work. Will 
the Holy Spirit change his worldly heart ? 
This seems very doubtful to us when we look 
at him. But it is a thing to be longed for, 
both for the honor of God and the good of 
men. We may therefore pray for it, pray- 
ing more earnestly the more appearances are 
against it. Human society, also, is full of evils : 
the powerful are haughty, the masses are en- 
vious, God is forgotten in the general worship 
of mammon. There is no sign that these evils 
are about to be done away. All that we see 
indicates not the near, but only the very re- 
mote triumph of the gospel. But shall our faith 
fail, or our strong prayers cease to go up, be- 
cause the victory of right over wrong, which 
we know would be for the glory of Christ, 
is so wrapped about with clouds and dark- 
ness ? He to whom that victory belongs 
has taught us, in the story of the importu- 
nate widow, that we may pray for a good 
object even when it is to us wholly uncer- 



ITS OBJECTS. 73 

tain — when our wish that it may be granted 

involves the duty of hoping against hope. 

If our sympathy with Christ be more 

Uncertain- " 

tymayin- passive than active, and we dwell on his 

tensify the 

spirit of final reign instead of the hard battles 
which lead to it, our prayers in the 
face of present opposition may falter. But if 
we deeply feel how great a thing any victory 
over evil is, and how able God is to give it 
even while we are speaking, we shall pray 
for it as earnestly as though we saw it within 
our certain grasp. When the heart of Jacob 
was set on a special favor, which he desired 
of God, he prayed more eagerly as his case 
seemed less hopeful. In his despair he laid 
hold of the angel, and wrestled with him. 
The love of God in us takes many forms. At 
one time we exult before him over the coming 
glories which he has promised ; at another 
time we plead with him for blessings with- 
out which souls must perish, but of which 
prophecy has not spoken. 

The Christian who ceases to pray for his 
Master's cause, as the progress of that cause 



74 PR A YER. 

grows doubtful, sets himself against the bidding 
of God. He does violence to the spirit of God, 
which has been given unto him. Yielding him- 
self to that spirit, his prayers will not become 
vague and cold. Outward difficulties will not 
daunt him, or raise any fear in his heart. Be- 
lieving that with God nothing is impossible, 
and that no true prayer is ever in vain, 

The soul l J 

forced back he will corae boldly to the mercy- seat, 

upon God. 

and besiege it for blessings which have 
not been promised. The answer may not come 
in the exact form he desires, but he is sure 
that it comes. That his prayer is heard he 
may not know now, but he shall know here- 
after. It may then be revealed to him that 
his quiet waiting on God was itself the very 
substance of the things he prayed for. We 
must pray for objects which are uncertain, 
feeling that in themselves they would be for 
God's glory. We can have a faith in the ex- 
ercise of which we shall believe that which 
appeals to our unbelief. A strong zeal for 
Christ may cause the greatest hinderance to 
depart and be carried into the sea. This look- 



ITS OBJECTS. 75 

ing for victories of which there is no sign, solely 

because we would see God glorified in them, 

will gird us for instant labor. We shall forget 

our weakness ; nothing will seem too 

Prayer ° 

stimulates hard for us ; through Christ strength- 

to labor. 

ening us we can do what the exigency 
calls for; and so gradually we shall ourselves 
put obstacles out of the way, and secure, by 
our labor and patience, the things we asked 
God to grant us. It is one of our most joy- 
ous experiences when, after earnest prayer 
and toil amid great discouragements, we see 
the clouds that had settled upon us rolling off; 
when we may gird ourselves for new battles, 
in the strength of past triumphs, having learned 
that the darkest uncertainties which lower about 
our holy cause, are nothing to Him who gives 
us the victory and the dominion. 

3. There remains but one other class of 
objects for me to speak of; those, namely, 
which are neither sure nor in their nature 
seem to be for the glory of God, but which 
would not conflict with the divine character, 
while they would be a blessed relief or com- 



76 PRAYER. 

fort to us. For all such objects I think it 
right that we should pray, on the simple 
ground that they are very dear to us. We 
whatever ought not to feel that we are treading 
ti^nheart on f or °idden ground, when we carry 
craves may an y experience or allotment, any trial 

be prayed J x ' J 

for - or hope or fear entering into our 

present life, before God. It is not only the 
last, but the best and sweetest resource of the 
Christian, when other comforts fail, to be allowed 
to pray. Whether God will interpose or not 
we cannot tell ; but how blessed to ask of him 
what we yearn for, when the very asking fills 
us with his inflowing life ! Some good men, 
mostly in the Romish church, have thought it 
not wrong to pray for the dead who died in 
their sins. This custom I cannot rudely con- 
demn, though the Bible seems to me to be 
against it. It is, no doubt, a profanation, es- 
pecially as many practise it ; it weakens the 
proper emphasis of this life, as the only time 
for coming into peace with God of which we 
have knowledge ; yet I sometimes think that 
God may bear with us, not angry, but pleased 



ITS OBJECTS. 77 

with our strong crying and tears, when our 

natural yearnings, which go out after loved 

and lost ones, are poured forth into 

One or two 

possible his ear. Also, when our friends are 
sick unto death, and we see no hope 
for them but to die, the strong impulse is 
to plead for their lives ; and we must thus 
plead, or we trample on our own hearts as 
well as the divine mercy. I believe that many 
such prayers are heard, and that our dead are 
given back to us alive by the healing power 
of God. The promise that the prayer of faith 
shall save the sick should, perhaps, not be 
understood now as it was in the days 

God's in- 

terposition ol the apostles. God does not mani- 
BpMtuai. f es ^ himself to us within the domain 
of nature, as he did to his people 
of old. His miracles are in these days inward 
and spiritual, rather. In this higher and nobler 
sense only he may choose to grant our desire ; 
yet even the temporal mercy may be sought at 
his feet, and to lie before him as waiting sup- 
pliants prepares us for whatever issue he shall 
send. 



78 PR A YER. 

These sharp trials, which seem at first to 
preclude hope, do not kill the impulse to pray, 
but often make it burn with an intenser flame. 
The Christian may live on for months, and 
forget to lift his soul mightily unto God, while 
at peace in his worldly affairs. But when 
troubles fall thick, and the hand of God is 
heavy on him, his tongue is unloosed. 

Trouble a 

spur to Prayer becomes him more, the more 

Driver 

his path grows dark. While the sea 
was smooth he let his Master sleep undisturbed 
on the pillow ; but now that the storm is burst- 
ing in fury about him, and the great waves are 
going over his head, he springs to the almighty 
Helper, saying, u Save me, or I perish." 

It is a question often raised, how far our 
prayers which are for personal and private 
blessings shall be made in public. Some per- 
sons, having a natural dread of pub- 
TubUc licity, sav that they belong wholly to 

prayers for J 1 J ° J 

individ- the closet and family. With this feel- 

uals. 

ing I cannot agree. Our modesty 
should not carry us too far. The fellowship 
which we have one with another in Christ has 



ITS OBJECTS. 79 

its privileges and claims. Why should we 
shrink from telling it to the church, and ask- 
ing them to help us bring our burden before 
God, if there be on our hearts some heavy 
load which God only can remove ? " Brethren, 
pray for us," is the cry of the Christian's heart 
while he yearns after a wayward child, or longs 
for the enlargement of his own soul, or feels 
some dear object slipping daily out of his grasp. 
No doubt this privilege is often abused. Worldly 
men have heard themselves named in large 
assemblies, and made the subject of frantic 
appeals to God, in a way that has repelled 
them from the house of prayer. In all such 
cases some knowledge of men is needed, as 
well as the meekness and gentleness of Christ, 
that our prayers may be the voice of other 
hearts than our own, and not offend the finer 
feelings of any sensitive worshipper. But this 
sensitiveness may go too far. It, rather than 
the other extreme, is the danger of many 
Christians. We need to cultivate frankness. 
It does us good to tell men what God is 
doing for our souls. We ought to speak to 



gQ PR A YER. 

one another in hymns and spiritual songs. How 
are we to obey the command to pray 
tnsmfe- for one another, if personal petitions 
are for the closet alone ? if we never 
bring our private burdens to the public as- 
sembly ? This whole matter will regulate itself, 
I believe, so that we need take no thought for 
it, but let the spirit of prayer in us flow out 
just as it will, in all places, while we are full 
of the mind of Christ, and of that childlikeness 
which makes us great in his kingdom. I have 
known prayers of this class to be made the 
occasion of denouncing enemies, or of eulo- 
gizing and courting friends; but they cease 
to be prayers just so far as thus abused ; nor is 
this abuse any reason why we should cut our- 
selves off from the dearest refuge to whicli 
we may fly in our distress. 

It cannot be wrong for us to do, in a spirit 
of brotherly love, what Christ did so often 
for his troubled friends. Since he wept and 
prayed at the grave of Lazarus, we may call 
on God for our afflicted brethren. St. Paul 
repeatedly asked the churches to pray for 



ITS OBJECTS. 81 

him, assuring them that they were always 
mentioned in his prayers. A pastor cannot 
preach the gospel with much hope, if the 
Spirit of Heaven be not all the time breathed 
scriptural about him in the supplications of his 
view ' people. I think we should carry all 

these interests, so dear to one or another of 
us, yet often so uncertain, before God — the 
conversion of our families, the safety of absent 
friends, the cause of the needy, the infirm, the 
bereaved. He has encouraged us to do this, 
— not by revealing to us his own will in the 
case, but by assuring us that he is a God of 
compassions. We come to him not knowing 
just what he will do, or whether our request 
be in the highest sense right and proper; yet 
yearning for the particular blessing, and sure 
that he pitieth us as a father his children. 
We lay our case at his feet, while he bends 
in loving-kindness over us ; and the witness 
of his Spirit with ours fills us, in that very 
moment, with a peace which needs not to be 
increased, and which no denial of our special 
requests can take away. 
6 



82 PRAYER. 

The triumph of prayer is the submissive 
spirit in which it culminates. Oh, what a vic- 
tory it is for the Christian when he can say, 
"My soul is as a weaned child"! Let us 
strive for this faith, — that in their noblest 
meaning all our prayers are indeed answered. 
If we lack this conviction we shall go on 
mourning in our pilgrimage. What deeper 
sorrow can we reach than the belief that God 
does not hear our prayers ? How painful our 
Asubmis- blindness if we fail to see the answer 
Bive spirit, because it comes not in such form as 
our poor hearts chose for it ! If all things 
are for the sake of the life of Christ which is 
in us, whatever God sends is his Amen to 
our supreme desire. The Good Shepherd is 
surely leading us to just the place we would 
find ; therefore let him lead us by the way 
which is hardest, even though it be the valley 
of the shadow of death, if his own wisdom so 
appoint. We may not see the blesssing, so 
as to find in it what we most sought, till after 
many days ; perhaps never, while we see 
through a glass darkly, but only when we 



ITS OBJECTS. 83 

see as we are seen. The treasure is veiled 

to our present sight, but it is laid up for us 

where no thief approacheth. It is 

know, at safe in that radiant land to which 

length, that ■> -, it • > ±. 

aii true shadows and disappointments never 
prayers are come> W [\\ it not be an occasion of 

heard. 

immeasurable joy, when the veil is 
lifted, to find that all the true prayers which 
we offered on earth are indeed answered? 
that the desires of our hearts have ripened 
into immortal fruits, and that we shall feed 
upon them in the house not made with hands, 
while the Lamb, which is in the midst of the 
throne, leads us unto living fountains of water ? 



84 PRA YER. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE FRUITS OF PRAYER. 

All true prayers are answered, as we shall 
find in heaven, if not on earth. Yet the delays 
to answer, either seeming or real, with which 
God often tries us, may be taken as positive 
denials. The praying heart which thus takes 
a tempta- them is tempted to grow weary of 
prayer, and to say that it is a profit- 
less service. Yet, even granting that the things 
for which the Christian prays are withheld, it 
does not follow that he prays in vain ; for we 
are to consider the reflex influence of prayer. 
The life of prayer is a school to the believing 
soul ; in it one finds a discipline which should 
ever keep him from feeling that he prays to 
no profit. It is of these inner fruits of prayer, 
variously named its philosophical or subjective 



ITS FRUITS. 85 

influence, its discipline, its reflex power, that 
I will now speak. The Christian has 

The life of * 

prayer a a rich answer to all his prayers in the 

school. . . . 

noble training which they are to his 
own soul, though the special things asked of God 
should never come. 

Faithfulness to any religious duty makes the 
soul better. " Thereby shall good come unto 
thee," is the dear assurance with which God 
calls us into his service. This is the certain re- 
ward of all well-doing. If we give to the needy, 
we know that to give is more blessed than to 
receive. The benefactor is always the chief 
beneficiary. He that watereth is watered also 
himself. He shall reap bountifully who sows 
bountifully. We save our lives by losing them. 
Whoever labors most in the Kedeemer's name 
spiritual nas the largest measure of blessed- 
ness. In the accumulation of this in- 
ward and spiritual wealth, if in no other sense, 
the words of St. James are true : " The effect- 
ual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth 
much." 

But, leaving these general statements, let me 



86 PRA YER. 

specify some of the fruits which grow in the 
soul under the influence of a life of prayer. 
1. One of these blessed inner fruits or re- 
wards is the knowledge of God which 

Knowledge ., , __ 

ofGod comes to us through our prayers. If 

°°™ s r by we hear of any noble or marvellous 
thing, yet strange to us, we do well 
to seek it out and to enter so far as we can into 
its meaning and life. It may claim this of us 
for its own sake, and our souls are blessed and 
enlarged in paying it their homage. The struc- 
ture and history of our planet are to 

All study * L 

of truth en- the geologist a fascinating study. The 

nobling. 

heavens show a vast field of inquiry to 
the watchful eye ; their grandeur and mystery 
are a challenge to us to search their depths. 
The science of mind also, more than any mate- 
rial science, has a claim on our regard. What 
are the most wonderful adjustments, motions, 
and subtile forces in the outer world by the side 
of that human spirit which can trace them out 
and make them work together for its own pleas- 
ure ! And if our minds be so worthy of study, 
how much more the mind of an angel or archan- 



ITS FRUITS. 87 

gel ! And if we are lost in wonder over the 

powers of the spirits before the throne, what 

shall we say of the Kino; himself, in 

God the J t to 

greatest of whose presence they veil their faces? 

truths. , . 

It must be an infinitely greater thing 
to know God and enter into his blessed life than 
to study out the creatures of his power. 

But every science has its instruments and 
methods, without which it could make no prog- 
ress. The geologist could do nothing but for 
the earthquake, the volcano, the action of water 
and of ice, leaving behind them a record of by- 
gone millenniums, and bringing the central parts 
of our globe within reach. The astronomer has 
his glass and his calculus, by which the heavens 

are made to give up their secrets. 
Every sci- ]yf en t a i science stows by reflection 

ence has its o J 

instru- upon our own inner life, whose vary- 

ments. x 7 J 

ing phenomena the wonderful organ 
of consciousness enables us to note and record. 
And so there is a means, an indispensable 
method and instrument, to be used in gaining 
a knowledge of God. It is by prayer alone 
that the soul of man may come near to God, 



instrument 
of divine 
science. 



88 PRA YER. 

and behold and study his attributes. The stu- 
dent of nature may learn something of God. 
Self-study brings one where God's voice is 
heard. But no man, however observing or 
thoughtful and acute, is able to know God 
save in the way of prayer. This is the sweet 
ministration for which he that would find out 
God must wait. Prayer opens the heavens, and 
makes them shine. By it we climb 
the ladder whose top is within the 
veil. Drawing near to God, we find 
him drawing near to us ; his life comes 
into us as the ocean-tide into the river, and we 
flow into him as the river into the sea. It is 
prayer which brings us to the point where 
the human life mingles with the divine. In no 
way save by its blessed ministrations can we 
rise to God ; his ways are higher than our ways, 
and his thoughts than our thoughts, till the spirit 
within us cries, " Abba, Father." When we have 
learned what we can about him by searching 
in nature, and have scanned his glories as holy 
men tell them to us, and have questioned our 
own understanding and reason, we are yet with- 



ITS FRUITS. 89 

out that true knowledge of him for which our 
spirits thirst. We are like one who would 
search the heavens with unaided eye, or ex- 
pound the story of the earth without going 
down into its depths, or tell us what is in 
man while regardless of self-study. Whatever 
we have found out in other ways, new words 
of glory, wisdom, and love will open to us in 
God as we grow into the habit of prayer. While 
we tread this path with willing feet, God reveals 
to us what he hides from the wise and prudent ; 
divine truths never known to the mere sage 
are clear to the praying child. Hence 

No true r J ° 

knowledge the wonder often seen in actual life : 

of God by 

other the philosopher sitting at the feet of 

the peasant and listening with awe to 
his unlettered master, who tells him of a world 
he has failed to find. The weak things are 
stronger than the mighty ; the foolish things 
confound the wise. Prayer has never brought 
the great man who thus wonders into fellowship 
with God. He beholds the mighty Ruler of 
worlds, but not the Father of his own spirit. 
He sees justice, skill, and power, but not the 



90 PRA YER. 

depths of long-suffering, forgiveness, and pity- 
ing love in our God. When his feet can go 
no farther, the praying soul spreads its wings 
and flies away to be at rest in loving arms. 
Where his eye sees but a speck of nebulous 
matter, prayer reveals to his lowly brother 
bright regions of divine goodness, radiant at- 
tributes clustered in perfect harmony. To the 
prayerless heart God is only a remote force. 
There is in him no nearness, no fatherly ten- 
derness, no beauty of patience and compassion, 
that it should desire him. 

How sadly this view of God, beyond which 
we never get, save in prayer, belittles him to 
our minds ! He is a Father full of all those 
thoughts and feelings which become a father's 
heart. Though he is unchanging in his essence 
and character, no tongue can tell in how many 
sweet ways he shows that he is love. His 
tender emotions are as various as the ex- 
perience of his children; and each feeling 
that moves his heart is the answer of love to 
some want, or fear, or trouble, or hope in us. 
It is by prayer that we open our souls to this 



ITS FRUITS. 91 

fatherliness, receiving not only the knowledge of 
it, but the supreme blessedness which it gives. 
When we have sinned, and our hearts condemn 
us, if the penitence we feel be uttered in the 
form of a prayer for pardon, we shall find that 
God is merciful and gracious. Our going to him 
and casting the load of guilt down at his feet 
is met by the assurance in our hearts that he 
forgives sin. By praying amid calamities • we 
learn his compassion. Telling him our grief, we 
find that he is a sympathizing Father. If we 
go to him in our perplexity, his infinite wisdom 

is the answer to our need. When we 
in God faint by the way, prayer brings him be- 

tters to " f° re us as ^ ne ^"°d wno gi yes strength 

to the weary. Amid our changes and 

man want. J ° 

tossings to and fro, we turn to him as 
without shadow of turning. In our weakness 
prayer reveals to us his almighty power. If 
we cry to him in our trouble, we find him a God 
of comfort. Flying to him in our ignorance, he 
meets us as the omniscient One. Speaking to 
him out of our prosperity, we learn his loving 
kindness ; and in the day of adversity he reveals 



92 PR A YER. 

himself to our praying hearts as a chastening 
Father. His eternity is the response to our 
brief mortal life : the strength which is in him 
stands over against the weakness in us ; our 
humble and obscure lot carries us up to the 
glory in which he dwells ; the sentence of death 
which we receive in our bodies is met by the 
eternal life abiding in him. Thus it is that our 
souls, communing daily with God, are always 
finding out some new proof of his infinite love. 
He places us in all kinds of allotments 

A check- 

erediotde- and experiences here — successes and 

sirable. 

reverses, joys and sorrows, pleasures 
and pains ; and then, as we let the spirit of prayer 
in us take form according to this mingled and 
various life, one glory after another in his char- 
acter is turned out to our view. The soul's 
observatory is its place of prayer. Divine ex- 
cellences, revolving like the stars in the sky, are 
there manifested to it. It sees the King in his 
beauty. It looks on the things which are un- 
seen and eternal. The confusion of the world 
dies far below it, and God comes into the still 
retreat to sup with it and it with him. 



ITS FRUITS. 93 

2. Another of these fruits of prayer is the 

strength it brings for the labors to which God 

calls us. The most honored servants of God 

in all ages have spent much time in 

gives prayer. The early patriarchs loved to 

SKT be alone with God ' That Pastoral life 
which they lived was favorable to di- 
vine companionship. They led their flocks in 
the grassy wilderness, beside the soft-flowing 
streams, along the shady slopes of the moun- 
tains. Amid these scenes of nature 

The disci- 
pline of the they pitched their tents, and mused, 

patriarchs. . 

and slept, sweetly conversing with the 

Father of their spirits. It was this discipline 

of prayer which fitted them to be the founders 

of the chosen nation, the receivers and keepers 

of the covenants of promise, the seed from which 

the Saviour of the world should spring. 

This loving walk with God empowered Moses 

for his arduous mission. He was put- 
Moses. . . 

ting on the needed strength for his 
work all the time that he kept the flocks of Jethro 
in Midian. In the judgment of some critics, he 
wrote the story of the upright man of Uz dur- 



9-4 PRA YER. 

ing that long retirement. It was the divine 
life coming down into his human life which 
prepared him to be the leader of Israel. In 
all his -wanderings God gave him audience, re- 
freshed and enlarged his soul, made him strong 
to meet Pharaoh, to deliver his enslaved people, 
and to bear with their slow-heartedness and mur- 
raurings. Elijah passed much of his time with 
God in the caves and by the brooks of 
the desert; and the fruit of that holy 
fellowship is seen in his bold reproofs of Ahab, 
in his challenge to the priests of Baal, in his 
brave witnessing against the corruptions of his 
time. He grew weak, and sank down into hope- 
lessness, as he missed the inspiration which came 
to him through his prayers. Intercourse with 
God gave to all the saints of other days power 
for those deeds at which we now marvel. 
Through this blessed channel came their faith, by 
which they subdued kingdoms, wrought 

All saints. . 

righteousness, obtained promises, stop- 
ped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence 
of fire, out of weakness were made strong, waxed 
valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of 



ITS FRUITS. 95 

the aliens. Even our blessed Lord was in this 
way made strong for his toils and suf- 

Christre- * # ° 

freshed by ferings. A night of prayer, rather than 
a night of slumber, was his chosen re- 
freshment. The mind unbends itself in this 
holy exercise. It is a sweet relaxation. It re- 
news the youth of the soul. Our continuance 
in well-doing depends on these refreshings from 
the presence of God. The heart of the Chris- 
tian grows weary amid his outward duties. No 
care for the body seems to help him : the source 
of his discouragement is not in the weakness of 
the flesh, but in the unwilling spirit. He has 
lost the deep sense of God's presence ; 

The refuge 

ofthe and it is only as he raises his soul to 

weary. 

God in prayer, till God comes down 
and meets him anew, that the darkness gathers 
up its folds, and his light and peace return 
to him. The snare in which he was caught 
lets go its hold ; his feet are taken out of the 
miry clay, and set upon a rock ; the duties which 
had grown irksome are his joy again, and he 
sees before him a plain path. No prayerless 
persons were ever full of good works. The 



96 PRAYER. 

commands of God are a weariness to all such, 
hard sayings which they cannot hear. The Con- 
fessions of Augustine show that prayer was his 
Augustine life? an d that his vital breath failed as 
and Luther. ^ G ceased to pray; Luther was sure 
to study well only as he had prayed well ; and 
the feeling of every believing heart is an amen 
to these testimonies. 

But there are duties for the church no less 
than for the individual. These, requiring our 
united action, will be properly done only as 
we are together fitted for them by union in 
prayer. There would not be much faltering 
in the work of the church if its members were 
all the time praying with one heart and mind. 
This is the royal way to unity of action, such 
action as God never lets fail. The 

The power 

of a pray- lines of our influence are apt to cross 

ing church. 

one another, and do little more than 
make us all weak against the common foe, while 
we are not drawn together to the mercy-seat. 
That is not only the point of view, but of in- 
spiration also, where we are to make ready for 
the battle. As we join in the same prayers, 



ITS FRUITS. 97 

the same life comes down into all our souls. 
That life, the gift of our everliving Head, heals 
all divisions. The many members are made one 
body by it. In the consciousness of this unity 
we can bring our efforts to bear on a common 
object; and no Christian work is too hard for 
us, since God works in us to will and to do. 
We are not merely praying individuals, but a 
praying church, and hence a progressive and 
victorious church. Not merely one by one, but 
all together, we must often climb the heights 
of prayer; thus alone shall we bend our e}-es 
forward as the eye of one man along the way 
of our covenant in Christ. On these heights we 
are above evil desires, and breathe that air of 
heaven which begets in us a common zeal. We 
cannot too often look thus away over the field 
on which we are to struggle for a common 
triumph. It is the united prayers of the church 
in which separate interests are forgotten, and 
prevents a single love fills all souls, which bring 
alienation. ug slloulder to shoulder in the good 

fight of faith, which keep the blood-bought rai- 
ment of our spirits clean and white, which save 

7 



98 PRA YER. 

us from doubt or weakness when the battle is 
hard against us. Whatever the Avork to which 
the members of a church are set, praying to- 
gether often as dear brethren and friends makes 
them conscious of the silken cord which 

Makes the 

members binds them all to Christ. The burden 

one in feel- 
ing and upon them is light, however heavy in 

itself; for it rests on many shoulders, 
which prayer is making strong to bear it. They 
have God dwelling in them ; hence their hands 
are not feeble, neither do they fight as one that 
beateth the air. Every step they take is forward 
and determined, and each blow struck for the 
truth goes to its mark with a sure aim and a 
resistless energy. 

3. One other fruit of prayer, which would 
make it our greatest blessing though it did 
only this for us, is its ennobling power in the 
soul. It is a divine education, the school of 

our spiritual nature. It unfolds, en- 

Prayer en- 
nobles the larges, and refines that in us which 

soul. 

makes us the children of God. The 
prayers which we offer come back into our 
souls bringing God with them. Thus we are 



ITS FRUITS. 99 

partakers of his holiness, and he changes us 
into his own image by his indwelling. 

It is not true that we must needs be like 
the worldly influences about us. Man was made 
to have dominion over the world. But how 
is one to be saved from sinking to the level of 
his earthly lot? How may he become noble 
our proper m * ne midst of mean surroundings, 

dominion. gent]e amid ^ ^^ pure amid ^ 

corrupt? Whence the possibility of a Joseph 
in Egypt, and a Daniel in Babylon ? Let us 
look a little at this. By a well-known law, to 
which the human soul is subject, it grows to 
be like that with which it is in daily and lov- 
ing companionship. If it be wholly occupied 
with trivial things, it will itself grow to be 
meagre and trifling. So wonderful are its ap- 
titudes that it can shape itself to any pursuit 
which it persistently follows. It can learn to 
delight itself in studying the most in- 

Two oppo- ° . 

sitetenden- tricate problems of philosophy, or to 

cies in us. . 

be content with the simple rounds of 
manual toil. There are tendencies in it to which 
it may yield till drawn to the lowest level of 



100 PRA YER. 

vice ; other tendencies, which, if cherished and 
followed, will bring it to the summits of virtue. 
Now it so happens in this present life that we 
are exposed to many influences which help the 
tendency downward. Much time must be given 
to duties which do not nourish what is noblest 
in the soul. Hence it has ever been the habit 
of the wisest men to be interested in 
roundings some ennobling object, thus saving 
The'down- themselves from the influence of the 
ward ten- earthly work which they are set to 

dency. J 

do. The wise merchant, or mechanic, 
or farmer has his books of history and poetry. 
He surrounds himself with statues, paintings, 

or other things within his reach, which 

minister to his love of the beautiful; 
and thus he unfolds in himself those finer powers 
which his worldly business might enfeeble or 

destroy. Certain ancient sages taught 

What 

pagan sagea that God placed the starry heavens 
where we may behold them, to save 
us from the belittling influence of our earthly 
life. We all have felt, many times, the won- 
derful contrast between a clear sky spangled 



A common 



ITS FRUITS. 101 

with glittering worlds above us, and the scenes 
amid which we are forced to do onr common 
work. We know from experience that study- 
ing the stellar universe keeps one from the 
narrowing tendency of his secular affairs. He 
who loves to trace out the laws of any province 
in nature, who delights in the creations of artis- 
tic genius, who cultivates his better qualities 
of heart by wise reading and thought, 

All noble J & to ' 

study saves who muses much upon the beauty and 

from earth- 

lyinflu- order of God's works, has a safeguard 

dices* • 

against lower attractions. His daily 
toils may be unfriendly to the wants of the soul, 
but he is bound to higher joys by a golden 
chain ; he dwells in a serene life, to which the 
lowering influence of his employments cannot 
rise. He is among them, but not of them. 
While trivial things keep his hands busy, great 
thoughts are filling his soul. 

But studies of this class take time if intelli- 
gently carried on. They are often incompati- 
ble with other claims upon us, or they draw 
the mind away into empty dreams which it 
mistakes for truth. We cannot get the needed 



102 PRAYER. 

discipline in scientific studies, save by giving 

to them long and painful labor. Nor 

en"™^ 01 ^ s ^ ne intellect which they mainly 

open to strengthen our noblest part. Even 

many. ° A 

aesthetic studies may leave what is 
best in us meagre and torpid. It is our spir- 
itual nature, the capacity for holiness, which 
makes us like God. This is our crowning glory, 

placing us over all the works which 

Dses not x ° 

appeal to God has made ; by virtue of it we 

what is 

highest in are his children. For the training of 
this supreme faculty he furnishes the 
same blessed means to us all. The laborer need 
not turn aside from his toil to find it. He whose 
thoughts soar to the stars is no nearer to it 
than the farmer in his garden. The gift is im- 
partial. For our spiritual education 
Education God g ives us himself. And he gives 
possible to himself equally to all. We need not 
ascend on high to bring him down, 
nor search for him in the depths. He is near 
to us ; and we enter into union with him, and 
grow divine in our souls, by partaking of his 
life as we find him in our prayers. The life 



ITS FRUITS. 103 

of prayer is an education which shames the 
discipline of the schools. 

If you would make a weak and vicious man 
pure, keep him under the sway of a strong right- 
eous man, and the work is done. The new at- 
mosphere saves him ; the greater draws after 
it the less. It is the weakness of our philan- 
thropy that we do not lift up the fall- 

Why much 

phiianthro- en, scatter them one from another, 
and join them in constant society with 
ourselves. We are afraid to do this even if we 
would, or if we could. The corrupt shrink down- 
ward from us as much as we recoil upward from 
them. We do not meet each other heart to heart. 
If we could make them feel that we are indeed 
their friends, and show ourselves such, an inti- 
macy between them and us might spring up, 
whose power would lift them out of the pit. But 
where our love fails, that of God is most shown. 
He draws us unto himself. He is not a 

God would 

bind us to stranger to us, but our Father. He be- 
comes such as we are, and even takes on 
him the load of our guilt in the person of the Son. 
The more sinful we feel, the readier are we to fly 



104 PRA YER. 

to his waiting arms when we see him as he 
is. Thus it is that he lifts up, cleanses and 
blesses, all his children who dwell with him in 
the life of prayer. He makes them his own 
companions. His life, flowing down into them 
pravertu tnrou gh this union, deepens that spirit 
golden of prayer in them which they are al- 

chain. 

ways breathing upward to him. Their 
hearts grow around him as the vine around the 
oak, and so he lifts them away from grovelling 
things into the sweet and pure air of heaven. 
Nothing else which we can do is so important 
to us as our prayers. They lay open to us 
that Mind in which are all the treasures of 
wisdom and knowledge. They are a high com- 
munion with the Lord of lords. They attach 
the tendrils of our better self to a ladder whose 
top is lost in light. The more we mount up in 
our yearnings, the more are the riches of the 
divine nature disclosed to us. We may be 
chained down to the drudgeries of this world, 
but in spirit we partake of angels' food. We 
know what the sage meant when he said, 
" The soul grows beautiful as it draws near to 



ITS FRUITS. 105 

God." Though dark in ourselves, we become 
radiant in God's presence, even as clouds turn 
to gold in the sunbeams. 

If such be the fruits of prayer in the . soul, 

what must I say in reply to those who complain 

that they have been praying all their 

Why many J r J ° 

are not lives, and have found no such blessed 

blessed in 

their fruits? But do those who return 

empty in soul from the mercy-seat 
remember that that may not be prayer which 
they so name ? The mouth may be full of be- 
seeching words, and the spirit have no indwell- 
ing of God. It is when the tongue answers to 
the heart that we truly pray. If we make many 
prayers only because God claims them, they will 
be a weariness to us ; it is while they are the 
voice of an inward longing that they refresh the 
soul. If we speak to God from our lips, and not 
from the depths of our hearts, or if we fail to 
find him, and merely pray into the air, the re- 
Thesoui coil upon us will be spiritual death, 

must pray. ^^ ^^ jj^ j t j g ^ open ^ 

that God fills. What are all his visits to the 
man who has not eyes to see or ears to hear ? 



106 PRA YER. 

Let such an one stand under the canopy of 
night when all her hosts are shining, and the 
still depths almost whisper their secret, yet to 
him it is no more than " a foul and pestilent 
congregation of vapors." What is it to him 
though all knowledge and all mystery be un- 
folded before him? That which makes the per- 
ceiving soul wiser only confirms him in his 
ignorance. It does him no good to walk through 
galleries of art, to be told of classic 

No truth ° 

blesses the ages, to sit down where prophets and 
lawgivers once sat. The blessed feet 
of Christ have left no aroma for him on Judea's 
plains. He is not made better, but worse, by 
contact with noble and sacred things. Great 
influences seem to dwarf him, as the Alpine 
peasant is dwarfed in soul amid the sublime 
glories of his mountains. If we do not love what 
is above us, and long for union with it, beholding 
it will but sink us to a lower depth. Just here, 
I think, we come upon the secret of the evil 
sometimes charged against our prayers. We 
are not lifted, and enlarged, and glorified by 
them for the reason that we do not really pray. 



ITS FRUITS. 107 

Our souls are not open to God. Is it a lack of 
charity to say that many prayers are an idle 
pretence, a form of speech only, in which the 
soul comes not near to God? The glories and 
wonders of the divine character, so far from 
blessing, do but palsy the unwilling minds on 
which they are forced. We may pay a lip- 
service gathered from the speech of angels, 
fragrant as flowers of paradise, glowing with 
God's own breath ; but if we pray not in spirit, 
it is a vain oblation. It is not prayer. 
our pray- ^y e j no t g p ea k; 0ll t of a hungering 

ers profit- l ° ° 

less be- and thirsting soul. Our hearts do not 

cause we 

do not yearn to dwell in God, and that he 

God . may dwell in them. It is not a form 

of words from which the heart is left 
out, but the rising of an open soul into an infi- 
nite Father's arms, which brings the fullness 
of God into it, and makes it holy as he is 
holy. 

Astronomers say that our planet and its fel- 
low globes, and all other systems of worlds, 
together with the solar system, seem to revolve 
about a single vast sphere, which is the centre 



108 PRAYER. 

of the universe of matter. Whether such in- 
deed be the truth or not. we may never find out 
in this life ; but we know surely that all the 
countless host of minds does revolve about one 
infinite and all- sustaining Father. From him an 
energy goes out which is able to hold and for- 
ever e;uide in safet\>- each individual 

The source 

of aii spirit- of that host. This mighty influence, 

uallife. 

if we but open our hearts to it, will 
touch a sympathetic chord in us, and bring us 
into fellowship with God. If that divine beam 
has already touched our souls, let us keep them 
open to its larger incoming. Let us cherish 
every yearning we feel for the radiant centre 
from which it springs. Yielding to the blessed 
One who so sweetly draws us, let us live in his 
light, and receive of his life into ours, till he 
renews in us his own likeness. Thus shall we 
secure a safe orbit to our souls for all the future. 
They shall not perish or fall away into darkness 
when they pass out of the horizon of time, but 
be as stars in another firmament, where they 
shall shine forever. 



ITS POWER. 109 



CHAPTER V. 

THE POWER OF PRAYER. 

No thoughtful person will deny the ennobling 
influence of a life of prayer. Even atheists 
have said that praying is the highest act of 
the soul. But when we speak of prayer as a 
procuring power, operating outside of ourselves 
Aprocur- to obtain blessings which otherwise 
ing force. WO uld not come, many are inclined to 
doubt. Do our prayers reach beyond the fixed 
course of nature, and move the arm of God to 
interpose for us? 

This is the question, which we answer with 
a hearty " yes," while those who look at it from 
grounds of science alone are tempted to say " no." 
The following is a specimen of the tests they have 
offered to settle the dispute : Let part of the 
patients in a hospital where all are treated alike 



HO PRAYER. 

have the prayers of Christians for their return 
to health, and if those prayed for get well while 
many of the others do not, the power of prayer 
a worth- wuI l be shown. Our sceptical friends 
less test. w ju then admit, they say, that prayer 
may bring a supernatural force to bear which 
is effectual where natural means fail. We may 
doubt, however, whether they would keep their 
promise to believe, even if the experiment they 
propose were made. Denying the efficacy of 
prayer in the outset, they would say, in view 
of its effects, that the result was due to some 
subtile cause or agency of nature which had 
been overlooked. As an umpire between nat- 
uralism and supernaturalism, the test is therefore 
worthless. The man of science and the man 
of faith will each view the case from his own 
position, and hence each will be confirmed in 
what he already believes. It is because the ex- 
periment would be futile that the proposal of 
it seems to us disingenuous. Our faith in the 
power of prayer is too sacred a thing to be 
thus rudely mocked. 

This offensive challenge is often invited, I 



ITS POWER. HI 

admit, by the unwise utterances of a class of 
Christians. A proposal to test the value of 
our prayers by scientific methods is hardly more 
irreverent than what we sometimes hear on the 
other side. To affirm that God will give us any- 
thing we ask him for, as is sometimes hastily and 
thoughtlessly done by ignorant exhorters, car- 
ries a painful shock to the intelligent and devout 
soul. Only those who know nothing 

The dial- # ° 

lenge pro- yet as they ought to know will ven- 

voted • 

ture to speak of God as if they under- 
stood him altogether. They have yet to learn 
what it is to say from the heart, " Thy will be 
done." The man who says that when he wants 
money he kneels down and prays, and then goes 
to the post office and finds it enclosed to him 
in a letter, must be a very godly man not to 
seem irreverent ; we must know him to be in- 
capable of anything which is not the exact truth, 
or we shall suspect him of some effort before- 
hand, some very strong appeal made in some 
way to persons of known charity, which is really 
the procuring cause of the answer to his prayer. 
Do the good men who profess to believe that 



112 PRAYER. 

God supplies their daily needs because of their 
prayers alone acknowledge as frankly as they 
should what pains they take to acquaint the 
Christian public with their wants? If any are 
tempted thus to belittle the doctrine of the 
efficacy of prayer, and to mingle artifice with 
their faith in order to bear themselves out, it 
may be well for their sake that some gauge 
or test out of that realm of natural agencies 
to which they affect indifference should from 
time to time be proposed. But if scientific tests 
of prayer attempt a higher range, if they imply 
doubts as to its full and complete power with 
God when offered in a proper spirit, they are 
wholly out of place. The question is one which 
they cannot touch; for the world of prayer is 
wholly above the world of science, nor can the 
methods of one ever be inferred from those of 
the other. 

The Bible teaches us to regard as impious 
those who would apply a test from the realm 
of nature to a purely spiritual force. Who ever 
doubted the propriety of what Christ said when 
he was tempted in the wilderness ? Yet his 



ITS POWER. 113 

replies there given to his adversary put this 

whole subject in its true light. He would not 

command the stones to be made bread. He 

would not cast himself down from a pinnacle 

of the temple. His power to work miracles 

was given to him for high spiritual ends, and 

he would not idly subject it to the trial of natural 

rmpietyof l aw - He would not degrade and pro- 
naturalism. fane ^ ^ ^fag ^ ^ pl eage an enem y 

who was seeking to destroy him. Do those 
doubters who ask for scientific proofs of the 
power of prayer consider who their chief fore- 
runner was ? As Christ met him we must meet 
them. They, no less than he, pervert the doc- 
trine of the supernatural which the efficacy of 
prayer involves. Let them read the story of 
the temptation. It most remarkably anticipates 
their proposal. They wish us, who believe that 
prayer moves the divine arm, to do essentially 
what the tempter asked Christ to do. They 
seek in our case, as he did in our Lord's, to 
gauge the power which we have with God. 
The control of God over nature, which he exerts 
in response to the prayers of his people, is for 
8 



114 PRAYER. 

high and spiritual ends. We do not wish him 
to show it, at the demand of his enemies, to 
gratify a mere scientific spirit or please ob- 
stinate doubters. This mighty power is sacred. 
God uses it only for his own glory and the good 
of his children. They have no part in it who 
would make it bow to the idols of science. To 
pray for the recovery of the sick, with a view to 
putting God's power to the test, is to be utterly 
without the spirit of prayer. Prayer is no form 
of words used for experiment. Whoever comes 
to God must believe that he is the rewarder of 
them that seek him. We are asked to pray for 
a given object in that doubting spirit which 
makes prayer impossible. 

The temptation of Christ in the wilderness 
is not the only case in point. We read of cer- 
tain Scribes and Pharisees who came to Christ 
and said, " Master, we would seek a sign of 
Doubt re- thee." They had no faith in our Lord's 
peiied. Messiahship, or in his divine power, but 

doubted, and wished to put him to the test. 
They were not open to conviction. If he should 
cast out devils, they would say that he did it 



ITS POWER. 115 

through the prince of devils. Hence he declined 
their proposal ; did not give that which is holy 
unto dogs, or cast his pearls before swine. His 
answer to them was essentially the same as to 
his great adversary — " An evil and adulterous 
generation seeketh after a sign ; and there shall 
no sign be given it." The power of prayer 
being supernatural, we can never prove it by 
scientific tests, or to those who admit only 
natural causes. 

There is, then, a spirit in those who would 
move God by their prayers which is indispensa- 
ble to success. If we have not that spirit we 
cannot pray as God requires ; and it is only as 
we thus pray that he has promised to hear us. 
He has not promised to hear doubters, or those 
who try him with the methods of unbe- 

The spirit 

which God lief. How can we meet the challenge 
to pray if the terms of the challenge do 
not permit us to have the spirit of prayer ? Look 
as carefully as we will through the Scriptures, 
and we shall find no promise of divine aid in 
answer to our prayers which is not conditioned 
upon a right spirit in us. Where has God en- 



116 PRAYER. 

couraged the doubting heart to put him to the 
proof? Though he sometimes pleads with his 
people as if he were a man, he has not said that 
the soul which tempts him shall be heard. " All 
things whatsoever ye ask believing, ye shall 
receive/' are Christ's words. Here is no prom- 
ise that God will answer our prayers just to 
prove to us that he can; that he will hear us 
irrespective of the feeling in which we come 
to him. True discipleship on our part is as- 
sumed. It was to his own friends and followers 
that Christ spoke. Nor did he make the great 
promise indiscriminately even to these. Only as 
their souls were in a believing frame, knit to 
God in a perfect oneness of will and desire, 
could they offer the effectual prayer of the 
righteous man. This was the grand feature 
in our Lord's own prayers. He and his Fa- 
ther were one, and he came to do that Father's 
will. It was from this point of view that he 
looked at his sufferings; and his prayer was 
heard in its true intent, though the cup from 
which his sensitive nature shrunk did not pass 
from him. No true child of God, no one whom 



ITS POWER. 117 

God has promised to hear, prays for what is 
contrary to the will of God ; those objects which 
seem to him desirable, but concerning which the 
divine purpose is not clear, he prays for only 
as Christ prayed for deliverance in the garden. 
When our wills are in perfect accord with the 
will of God, and we walk by faith, not by sight, — 
when we long for only those things which are in 
the purpose of God, and are toiling for them as 
our supreme object in life, — we have that state 
of mind which alone can pray in the truest sense, 
and all that we pray for will be granted us. 

If any say that the objects of such praying are 
sure to be granted whether we pray for them 
or not, since God will surely do all that he has 
purposed, the objection is valid so far as it goes. 
But it does not prove that our prayers are need- 
less ; it is no cause for omitting to pray. Things 

which are the same in themselves, or 
SngsTif- so f ar as ^°d i s concerned, are differ- 
ferentto en £ | ug acc0 rding to the frame of 

spirit in which we receive them. If 
we have brought ourselves into union with God 
by praying for them, they will come to us as 



118 PRAYER. 

blessings ; but if a prayerless life has separated 
between us and him, so that our deepest yearn- 
ing is not for what he may please to send us, 
none of his dealings with us will have in them 
the blessed savor of answers to prayer : be they 
according to our natural wishes or against them, 
in either case our hearts will be left empty and 
wretched. Whoever offers the prayer which 
God always hears, can put his whole heart into 
this brief sentence : " Thy will be done." There 
ah prayers ^ s no ^ orm 0I prayer possible to him 
which does not grow out of this one 
petition. When our souls are renewed, cleansed, 
and sanctified, — when the great work for which 
Christ came absorbs our time and energies, and 
is the source of our fondest hopes — it can be no 
small or temporal thing which we shall long for 
in our prayers. All the things which we most 
desire will be a part of the unfolding counsels 
of God ; and the same events which are a curs- 
ing to such as lack this desire, will crown our 
lives with blessing. Only those who pray for 
the reign of Christ will have eyes to see him 
when he comes in his kingdom. Their souls 



ITS POWER. 119 

shall be awake, and they shall rejoice as those 
who never pray cannot, knowing what is meant 
when the floods clap their hands. 

In arguing that prayer has power with God, I 
make no use of what are to my own mind, and 
I doubt not to all Christians, the sweetest proofs 
of such power. We could fill volumes out of our 
experience — all kinds of exigencies and trials, 
some temporal, others spiritual — in which we had 
blessed witness that our prayers were heard. 
No Christian who has passed through times of 
religious awakening, who has seen the various 
enterprises of the church saved out of great 
perils, who has longed for the souls of wicked 
companions, who has had dear friends given back 
christian to him out of the sides of the grave, 
experience, doubts that prayer moves the arm of 
God. He is sure that God has respect unto the 
humble, and does not despise their prayer. The 
history of the church and Christian biography 
are a great treasure-house of proofs that prayer 
has this blessed power. But they are proofs 
whose force many do not feel. They are the 
paradise of the praying soul whose flowery 



120 PRAYER. 

walks the foot of doubt will trample, if admitted 
too freely among them. We go out of the 
enclosure, where we see the victories of prayer 
blossoming all about us, and seek some common 
ground, if any be not able to enter into our 
faith. 

Consider what men do when they deny that 
God is moved by our prayers. They imply that 
God is not sincere in many of his sweetest 
promises and assurances. On what page of the 
Bible do we not find some intimation 
lowslf that he is a prayer-answering God? 

prayer has The explicit declarations that he is 

no force. ■"■ 

such a God are almost without num- 
ber. Not only are they thus numerous ; they 
are the sweetest words in all Scripture. Our 
souls feel the benediction when we hear Christ 
say, '* Enter into thy closet, and when thou hast 
shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in 
secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret 
shall reward thee openly/' No gainsayings or 
criticisms of unbelief can ever spoil the aroma 
of the words, " If ye, then, being evil, know how 
to give good gifts unto your children, how much 



ITS POWER. 121 

more shall your Father which is in heaven give 
promises of good things to them that ask him!" 
God ' Take out of the Bible all those words 

which teach that prayer obtains blessings from 
God, and what remains would be a firmament 
without its stars. And while we sec them all 
clustered there, shining in beauty on every 
page, what follows if they have no meaning? 
Who is this that makes God a deceiver? Far 
from us be such a thought. God is true, and 
therefore he hears prayer. The Strength of 
Israel cannot lie ; and hence are they indeed 
stars, and not empty meteors, which make lu- 
minous his holy book. It is impossible that he 
should ever say, " Seek ye my face in vain." 

But the impulse to pray, which is in all men, 
witnesses, no less than the Bible, to God's re- 
gard for our prayers. If our prayers were never 
heard, yet all men are so made that they will and 
must pray. By a necessity of his na- 

Xatural 

impulse to ture every one has the praying instinct. 

Not only is prayer the vital breath of 

the Christian ; it is the spontaneous cry of all 

human hearts. That is a good definition of man 



122 PRAYER. 

which describes him as the creature who prays. 
Even the profane oaths which we hear from 
angry men on the streets are degenerate prayers. 
They show how far the praying instinct in us 
rrofane mav &U if suffered to come under the 
prayers. power of sin. Men are never so lost 
as not to cry unto God, and beseech his help, 
though only in this blind and shocking way. 
Let that impulse be delivered from the bondage 
of sin; let Christ be formed within it, and 
breathe his holy life through it, and those same 
men, instead of degrading it as they now do, 
would pray the prayers of an Elijah, a Stephen, 
or a Paul. We need have no fear that any 
doubts of science, or cavil and ridicule of what- 
ever kind, will drive prayer out of the world. 
Men will continue to pray as long as their hu- 
manity is in them. Nature triumphs over those 
who make a show of disdain ; for she forces even 
them, in times of great distress or sudden an- 
guish, to cry out for the living God. 

But what follows if there be no dear Father 
who hears and answers prayer? All must see 
what the inference is, — the same as from the 






ITS POWER. 123 

promises of the Bible. It follows that our God 
God not a nas played us false, that he breaks to 

a deceiver. our J^pg ^he l ovm g words he Compels 

our hearts to speak. Our whole life is thus 
made a poor mockery, the vainest of delusions, 
the most utter and pitiless deception that was 
ever contrived. Our nature is all the time 
forcing us to do what is at bottom a lie. God 
has so made us that we are ever asking him for 
what he never grants. Such is the theory, and 
we see that it represents God as deceiving us at 
the centre of the soul. The same faith which 
makes good to us what is most sacred in our 
own hearts confirms to us the scriptural doctrine 
of the power of prayer. If we would have any 
consolation, if we would trust our own instincts, 
or lay any basis of trust one towards another, we 
must believe that God is moved by prayer. He 
does not mock us with a stone, but gives us the 
bread we ask when our spirits cry out of their 
hunger to him. 

We are also to remember that our prayers 
avail with God, or the noblest culture of our 
lives is the fruit of a deception. Not only are 



124 PRAYER. 

we forced to pray, but we acquaint ourselves 
with God, and are lifted up and enno- 
cuiture-not ^led in all our faculties by a life of 
fraud°'' prayer. Can it be that the offering 
which does so much for us is a vain 
oblation? Is it rational to hold that we must 
put ourselves under the shadow of a religious 
fraud, and pray all our days as if God heard us, 
though our words are only beating the air, in 
order that we may reach the highest manhood or 
womanhood possible to us ? If prayer be indis- 
pensable to our best training, if no one can af- 
ford to neglect it, then must it have power with 
God ; for men will not practise it while per- 
suaded that it lacks this power; or if they do, 
it is a kind of self-imposition, abhorrent to rea- 
son, the tendency of which must be to make 
them, not better, but worse. 

The conclusion to which reason drives us, 
then, is, that all true prayers do move the will 
of God. He answers them, though not always 
in such ways as our partial wisdom might prefer. 
God chooses the form of the answer, and so far 
as it differs from our present wish it is some- 



ITS POWER. 125 

thing higher and better. His thoughts are 

above our thoughts while bestowing his favors 

upon us. He withholds the imperfect 

answer that he may give the perfect. It does 

often better 

than the not enter into our hearts how great 
• things he prepares for us. If we dwelt 
in him and he in us, and our souls were fully 
conscious of such indwelling, we should see that 
he more than grants all our petitions ; that which 
we in our blindness deem a withholding of bless- 
ing would be to our opened eyes what Ave ask 
for, not stinted in measure, but shaken together 
and running over. In the Lord's prayer is the 
petition, " Give us this day our daily bread." 
Many of God's poor have offered that prayer in 
the morning, and laid their aching heads down at 
night with no morsel to relieve bodily hunger. 
a common But was the prayer unanswered? Far 
case ' from it. Tell them it was not, and they 

will not believe you. They will keep on offering 
that prayer, soothed by it in some wonderful man- 
ner, having answer to it all the time in their souls, 
even while common food is denied them. We 
forget, in our doubts upon this subject, that man 



126 PRAYER. 

liveth not by bread alone. We too often choose 
the lower form ; it is well for us sometimes that 
God chooses only the higher form in which to 
answer our prayers. David said, " The Lord is 
my shepherd; I shall not want." But 

David. 

if his comfort depended wholly on tem- 
poral things, he did not speak the truth ; for he 
was afterwards brought down more than once 
into great straits of worldly misfortune. Only 
so far as he was a man after God's own heart, 
longing for spiritual blessings, keeping his will 
in accord with the divine will, did his cup over- 
flow, and none of his hope perish. The prayer 

of St. Paul for the removal of the thorn 

in his flesh was "answered, beyond his 
thought, in the words, " My grace is sufficient 
for thee." Our blessed Lord was once faint, and 
sat thus by the well while his disciples were 
gone away to buy meat. Yet when they re- 
turned with food, he gave them to understand 
Christ at that he had already eaten. But no one 

had supplied him with physical suste- 
nance. Then he announced to his wondering 
friends the great truth that there are spiritual 



ITS POWER. 127 

supplies for our wants with which no temporal 
supplies are worthy to be compared : " I have 
meat to eat that ye know not of. My meat is to 
do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his 
work." 

We conclude, therefore, that all true prayers 
are answered ; that they are answered as to the 
substance of their meaning, and in ways which 
would more than meet our largest expectation 
were we able to see just what is involved in the 
fulfilment of that divine will to which we have 
resigned ourselves. The agreement of desire 
between God and the believer who truly prays 
is such that God is said to pray in the believer. 
The fervent,- effectual prayer of the righteous 
man is an " inwrought prayer.''* The prepara- 
tion of the heart is from him who grants 
wrought the heart's petition. The Spirit help- 
prayer ef- e ^ infirmities; they are his groan- 

fectual. 7 J fe 

ings which we cannot utter when we 
find our souls burdened with a longing for some 
spiritual good. God worketh in us to will and 
to do ; and hence in hearing our prayers he ful- 
fils his own pleasure. Christ formed within our 



128 PRAYER. 

hearts by faith, is, in the prayer we offer, inter- 
ceding for us before the throne. Him the Fa- 
ther heareth always. He presents the golden 
vials from which the sweet incense is ever ris- 
ing. He in whom we live is one with the Fa- 
ther ; and his prayer must be heard, since God 
cannot deny himself. 

Not only are the prayers we thus offer all 
answered, but many of them are so answered 
as to compel men, even in this life, to see the 
interposition of God. Far be it from me to 
preach the cold doctrine that we are not to 
expect answers to our prayers in the forms we 
now choose for them. The divine agency is 
still concerned in carrying forward the work of 
redemption. The renewal of a soul by the in- 
fluences of the Holy Spirit is a supernatural 
event ; and the keeping of that soul all along 
the hard and steep path of sanctification is a 
process which calls for the divine co-working. 
No one has lived long in the world without be- 
ing forced to see some of those special provi- 
dences which he cannot but regard as forth- 
puttings of the finger of God. In this same 



ITS POWER. 129 

catalogue of gracious wonders belong all those 

answers to our prayers which are in 

to° uHhlt tne P re °i se ^OYm of our present wish. 

he hears They make luminous the experience of 

prayer. J r 

every Christian. They encourage us 
to ask for specific objects — the conversion of 
particular persons, the turning aside from us of 
impending evils, the sparing of lives which we 
hold dear, and on which Death seems to be fixing 
his grasp. How many such prayers have been 
answered, thus strengthening the natural im- 
pulse to offer them ! And they will continue to 
be offered, whether answered or not, in the form 

of our first wish, so long as men are 

Our exact 

wish some- men, and we find ourselves crushed 

times met. 1 .. • 

down by sudden sorrows, or m the 
presence of unforeseen dangers. We are sure 
that there must be One who careth for us when 
we cease to be able to care for ourselves. There 
is comfort, there is hope ; our foreboding hearts 
may take courage, for we are not alone, but He 
who heareth and answereth prayer is with us. 
Take this consolation away from us, and who 
would have any strength left to struggle longer ? 
9 



130 PRAYER. 

Who would not fall by the way, and lie prostrate 
in hopelessness, saying, like the disheartened 
prophet, " It is enough, Lord ; and now, if it 
please thee, I beseech thee take away my life " ? 
God has given his people no occasion to pray 
this mournful prayer. Oftentimes has he heard 
them in the precise manner of their wish, some- 
times bearing long with them, at other times 
appearing with his aid while they were yet 
speaking, or even preventing them with the 
blessings of his goodness. The last weapon we 

shall ever yield is the power to pray. 

When all other hope fails, we may cry 
out to God for help. There is that in us which 
declares that it can brighten the clouds of adver- 
sity. No cavils of unbelief, no delays of divine 
succor, will ever make us doubt that in the 
spirit of prayer we may encounter every evil. 
It is able to disarm Death of his terrors. It 
causes the gates of the city of gold to open 
before our weary feet. 

'Not only, then, is it impossible that we should 
not keep on praying, but all our right requests 
are granted, either in the form we wish or in 



The last 
resort. 



ITS POWER. 131 

some way divinely chosen for us, which is far 
higher and better. Since God is love, and has 
made ns praying creatures, we resign to his 
wisdom all those interests concerning which he 
does not as yet seem to hear us. We know 
that he does hear us, so far as we have 

Our hope 

often ex- a prayerful spirit in our praying. He 



has given us many proofs that we seek 
not his face in vain, and the proofs which are up 
to this time withholden shall be given us hereaf- 
ter. Not only do the past and present belong 
to us under God, but the future is ours also. 

Bereaved one, the little life which was so 
precious to you, and for which you prayed so 
earnestly that it might still gladden and fill your 

mother's heart, has not been taken from 

The be- 
reaved you in rude mockery of your trust. He 

who fulfilled the great wish of his Son, 
making him victorious over sin, though not hear- 
ing his prayer to be delivered from the cross, 
will sustain your sinking spirit. Walking with 
God in quietness, your will resigned to his, and 
your eye open to see the unfolding of his fatherly 
counsels, you shall have songs in the night. 



132 PRAYER. 

Yea, it shall come to pass in your evening time 
that it shall be light. And when you clasp your 
treasure once more, in the place where it is laid 
up for you, you will wonder that you were ever 
tempted to think your prayers unheard of God, 
while you are pouring forth the notes of praise 
to his goodness, who planned your life with all 
its changes precisely as was needed, that your 
joy and blessedness in his presence might be 
complete. When the elders of the church are 
called, and pray over the sick, the prayer of faith 
does save the sufferers. It may not save them 
in the poor sense of prolonging this earthly life 
in the flesh ; such miraculous interpo- 
sitions, needed in the infancy of the 
church, may be withheld in our day : the world 
is older now, and should not require to be per- 
suaded of the divine mission of Christianity by 
such means ; but that prayer, even though un- 
answered to our sight, does nevertheless accom- 
plish all that our faith can wish. "We shall see, 
when we no longer see through a glass darkly, 
that God has answered our prayers in ways in- 
finitely better for us than our slow hearts prefer- 



ITS POWER. 133 

red. We shall know, knowing as we are known, 
that the life of unanswered prayers for us would 
our lot in have been the life which we in our 
weakness chose, but which God, with a 
view to fulfilling all our desire, did not deal out 
to us — mercifully granting us, instead thereof, 
such temporal allotments as he foresaw would be 
sure to work out for us a far more exceeding and 
eternal weight of glory. 



134 PRA YER. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE HOUR OF PRAYER. 

The Bible has no more tender words than 
those which invite us to meet God in prayer; 
and there is, in our heart of hearts, a voice 
ever responding to those words. The fact, 
therefore, that we do not easily learn to de- 
light in prayer, but shrink from it as an irk- 
some duty, witnesses to the bondage of the 
divine nature within us. Our spirits are not 
free, but sold under sin. That to 
Haling which our holiest impulse moves us 
from prayer j fl dreaded, owing to the law in our 

proves. ; ° 

members to which we are in captivity. 
Our higher nature fears to do what it would, 
by reason of the lower nature, which has do- 
minion over it. This explanation of our re- 
luctance to pray, when the duty first begins 



ITS HOUR. 135 

to be urged upon us, is pictured in the story 
of Adam. Before his disobedience it was a 
joy to him to have God near, but he drew 
back from that pure presence as soon as he 
had sinned ; the child's yearning in him came 
into bondage to the feeling of guilt. God 
called to him as aforetime, in the cool of the 
day, saying, " Where art thou ? " but he was 
afraid, and hid himself among the trees of 
the garden. 

But a time comes, in the life of every soul 
which has been made a new creature in Christ 
Jesus, when that long-lost pleasure returns to 
it. The words, " Enter iDto thy closet," are not 
a stern command, as in the days of its estrange- 
ment from God, but the sweetest of all invi- 
tations. That soul has been disin- 

Thefree . - . . ... 

soul loves thralled. It is no longer m subjection 
to the body of death, but has been 
delivered into the liberty of the sons of God. 
Its best loved spot is the place where God 
daily meets it, and it goes to that meeting 
hungering and thirsting for divine communion. 
The moments set apart for our secret de- 



136 PRAYER. 

votions are " the children's hour " in God's 

family. All know how it is wont to be in the 

household where love reigns. The 

Scene from 

domestic child grows weary of playing, and 

life. 

steals away to the room where the 
father is. It finds the door ajar, and hears 
from within a voice of welcome. Entering 
freely in, it climbs upon the father's knees, 
and is folded in his arms. There it hangs 
about his neck, and interchanges with him 
the words and kisses of affection. It hears 
tender replies to any story of wants or troubles 
which it brings, and thus its heart is made to 
overflow with comfort and gladness. 

Now, it is just in this way, though with 
unspeakably more joy, that the children of 
God learn to turn towards him, and say, 
" Abba, Father." The new-born spirit is forced 
to be, much of its time, in that temporal world 
which is full of wearying disturbances. It is 
driven hither and thither by the impulses of 
the fleshly nature. It is tossed up and down 
upon a sea of temptations. It is deceived, 
misled, betrayed, disappointed, until it cries 



ITS HOUR. 137 

out, as did the poor Prodigal, for its Father. 

And that Father, " who seeth in secret,'' hears 

the cry of the distressed child. He 

How it is in 

the divine is near it, in the calm retirement 

family. . .... 

where it seeks refuge, inviting it, 
bewildered and helpless as it is, to come and 
rest itself by communing with him. There, in 
the closet, is its haven of peaceful waters. 
Have the archers shot at it, and is it sorely 
wounded ? There is the balm of Gilead and 
the Physician. That child hungers for food 
which the world cannot give ; and there it 
is, the bread of heaven, of which if a man 
eat he shall not hunger. It is the immortal 
spirit in him which thirsts ; and there, in his 
closet, he finds the water of life, which is a 
well of water, in those who drink it, spring- 
ing up into everlasting life. " Come, thou 
weary child, born of mine own Spirit," is the 
invitation ; " come and refresh thee in thy 
Father's love. Enter into thy closet, and be 
alone with me in secret, till thou shalt learn 
how much readier than any earthly parent I 
am to give good things to my children." 



138 PRA YER. 

After this manner does God speak of the hour 
of prayer. Thus do all the pure-hearted yearn 
for it, and welcome its coming. It is the cool 
arbor, fragrant and beautiful, out of which God 
calls to us daily, inviting us to turn aside from 
our flinty pathway, that we may be rested and 
refreshed in his presence. 

This meeting with the Father in secret, in 
order to fulfil its blessed ministry, must be 
distinguished by three things : reading the 
a threefold Bible > self- scrutiny, prayer. These 
cord - may be considered as three separate 

duties or exercises, but in our Christian life 
each of them will be found to involve the 
other two. No one can examine himself in 
the light of God, and not be constrained to 
pray, " Create in me a clean heart, and renew 
a right spirit within me." Whoever reads the 
Bible understanding what he reads, finds that 
his own thoughts, brought to that perfect rule, 
are in the mean time accusing, or else excusing, 
one another. And while one prays, uttering 
the weakness and longings of which he is con- 
scious, he finds no words but those of the Bible 



ITS HOUR. 139 

adequate to his groanings. As a ship escapes 
from the storm into its quiet harbor by means 
of three things, — ballast to keep it low in the 
water, sails to catch the wind, and a helm to 
guide its course, — so the Christian returns into 
his rest in the closet by examining himself, read- 
ing the Bible, and praying to his Father. These 
three work together. It is the Bible, read with 
a docile mind, which holds him to his course ; 
it is beholding himself in the light of God that 
keeps him low in his own thoughts ; it is the 
life 'of the Father, breathed forth in answer to 
prayer, which bears him onward into his rest. 
Each of these exercises so involves the other 
two, that whoever is faithful in either of them 
will be faithful in them all ; and if anv 

Reading ; J 

the Bible, man be negligent of either he will 

self-exami- 
nation, and slight them all. As soon as we begin 

way 8 e ^o " t° examine ourselves, we look for the 

hand" 1 perfect standard by which to try our 

character and life ; and as soon as we 

know that standard, we begin to cry, " God 

be merciful to me a sinner. 77 If you tell me 

that you never pray, then I know that you 



140 PRAYER. 

are not an earnest student of the Bible and 
your own heart. If I could persuade you to 
attend to either of these duties as you should, 
I might be sure that you would soon be faith- 
ful to them all. 

But do I not become a judge of my fellow- 
disciples, if it be they whom I would persuade 
to love the hour of prayer? If any are still 
waiting for arguments to draw them on to 
this blessed meeting with God, it can hardly 
be that they are his children. Can the new 
life be in them, and never leap upward after 
its source? It should startle us, and cause 
us to look sharply into the foundations of our 
hope in Christ, if we do not anticipate with 
pleasure the hours of communion with God. 
Should we esteem that an anchor to the soul 
which does not hold us lovingly to him who 
is the Father of our spirits? Prayer 

The Chris- 
tian life not i s the earliest cry of the new-born 

wunout child of God. The Christian life 

praycr * begins with it, and finds in it ever- 

more the light of life. It is only as we are 

estranged from God, unconscious of his divine 



ITS HOUR. 141 

nature dwelling in us, that meeting with him 
ceases to be our delight. The soul which 
never prays is dead. It begins to pray as 
soon as it begins to live. This is shown us 
in the case of St. Paul. The proof that he 
had been renewed by the divine Spirit was 
the fact that he prayed. The Lord said to 
his servant Ananias, " Arise, and go into the 
street which is called Straight, and inquire 
in the house of Judas for one called Saul 
of Tarsus, for behold he prayeth." 

St. Paul. 7 . 

Ananias need not be afraid of him 
any longer. He had been born into God's 
family : God had begotten him, through the 
Spirit/ to be his dear child j and the voice 
of that sonship in him was a prayer, feebly 
lisped in the dawn of the truth that God was 
his Father, and to be spoken more articulately, 
and with a richer fullness, as he grew towards 
the stature of a man in Christ Jesus. His 
praying showed that he had ceased to be a 
persecutor of the Christians, that he now was 
of the number of those who fled from him to 
Damascus. 



142 PRA YER. 

A prayerless Christian is an impossibility: 
it is as though a living man should not breathe, 
as though the sun should still be the sun while 
giving out neither heat nor light. To be a 
Christian is to partake of the life of Christ. 
But the life of Christ was a divine sonship in 
The voice humanity. By virtue of this sonship 
of sonship. he wag in the Fatlier? anc ) tll0 Father 

in him. This tender fellowship and indwelling 
was on the one side a constant prayer, and 
on the other side a constant hearing of that 
prayer. Therefore, if any pray not as Christ 
did, what can we say but that they have no 
part in him? Can you be God's child if you 
have no impulse to call on him as your Father ? 
if, when you hear him say, " Seek my face," 
you do not answer, "Thy face, Lord, will I 
seek " ? If you have been born of the free 
woman, how is it that you speak not the lan- 
guage of the free woman ? Should not the 
children of Canaan use the speech of Canaan ? 
Whoever has entered into the life of God 
will breathe the breath of that life, which is 
prayer. 



ITS HOUR. 143 

We cannot understand, while looking only 
at the nature of the Christian life, how there 
should ever be occasion to complain of the 
prayerlessness of Christians. But in speaking 
to this point, great charity becomes us. He 
that thinketh he standeth, may be the first 
to fall. Even where the spirit is willing, the 
flesh is sometimes weak. There are Sloughs 
of Despond, no less than Delectable Mountains, 
in the life of prayer. Our infirmities may 
choke the flame of devotion even after that 
flame has burned clearly. The earthly nature 

in us struggles against the heavenly. 
growweary Seasons of depression will come, in 

which we shall find it hard to pray ; 
nor is there any escape for us, save as we are 
clothed upon with our house from heaven. 
It is our old life of sin, rising up in us, and 
striving to regain its lost dominion, which 
causes us to grow weary of prayer. The new 
life, though burning low and almost quenched, 
still yearns, with such strength as it has, for 
the mercy-seat. It welcomes the divine visits 
with the whole power of its feeble voice. 



144 PRAYER. 

The new man in Christ Jesus, finding the im- 
pulse to pray weakened and sorely burdened 
in him, can exclaim, " It is no more I, but 
sin that dwelleth in me." He, renewed after 
the image of God, still prays ; and the meas- 
ure of his life in Christ is the delight he finds 
in prayer. The bruised reed is not broken. 
The smothered flame burns on. So far as he 
is a Christian, conscious of the divine life 
dwelling in him, he loves his hours 

A test of . . . . 

the new oi communion with God: he antici- 
pates them, he welcomes them, he 
enters with joy into their holy duties. That 
joy may be faint at the outset, but it becomes 
full, and he triumphs over his infirmities, as 
he opens his soul more and more. He finds 
a blessed refreshment in being alone with God ; 
and this refreshment is great according to the 
greatness of the life of Christ in him. 

That the hour of prayer is ever joyfully 
welcomed by the true children of God was 
wonderfully manifest in the experience of our 
blessed Lord. He seemed almost to have no 
other hour ; prayed so much in spirit, and 



ITS HOUR. 145 

entered so fully into the mind of the Father 

as to carry the atmosphere of the closet about 

with him wherever he went. Though 

A constant 

joy to appearing outwardly to men in tem- 

Christ. 

poral form and vesture, he yet in- 
habited eternity ; he dwelt in the bosom of 
the Father. This spiritual indwelling was that 
which most filled his consciousness, so that 
even in the midst of earthly disturbances he 
could be alone with God. We read of him 
as absorbed in works of love, yet, even while 
doing those works, rejoicing in spirit, and say- 
ing, " I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven 
and earth ; " saying these words in such a way 
as to show that the eternal, more than the 
He dwelt temporal, was present to his thoughts 
in eternity. — wholly and divinely blessed in know- 
ing that he was in the Father and the Father 
in him. At the grave of Lazarus also, while 
affected to tears by the grief of Mary and 
Martha, and while the company of Jews present 
were angrily watching him, this whole earthly 
scene was in a moment shut out from his mind. 
He was alone with God, in the sanctuary of 
10 



146 PRA YER. 

the soul ; and he lifted up his eyes, not to a 
distant power, but to an infolding presence, 
saying, " Father, I thank thee that thou hast 
heard me, and I know that thou nearest me 
always." He spoke these words in the secrecy 
of his divine Sonship, and his prayer was an- 
swered openly in the coming forth of his friend 
from the grave. In like manner, when he 
prayed for his disciples at the Last Supper, 
all his words came out of eternity — words 
which Ave can fathom only as we partake of 
the life eternal in him. Nothing earthly or 
temporal entered into the holy of holies where 
he prayed the Father for us. He was con- 
scious of being in the high sphere and region 
of his own divinity, a beloved Son communing 
with the infinite Father, praying for those 
whom he loved out of that Father's bosom. 
Yet even Christ, though always praying in 
spirit, was not content without special 
loved the hours, in which he went away by him- 
prayen se ^ to mee t the Father. When we 
read of him that " he was alone pray- 
ing," we feel that something habitual in his 



ITS HOUR. 147 

life is indicated. His whole career on earth 
seems to be summed up in that striking sen- 
tence which says, " In the daytime he was 
teaching in the temple, and at night he went 
out and abode in the mount that is called 
the Mount of Olives." When he came to his 
disciples in the fourth watch of the night, 
walking to their drowning ship on the stormy 
sea, he had just left the dear spot where he 
was wont to be refreshed in spirit. "It came 
to pass in those days," says St. Luke, " that 
he went out into a mountain to pray, and con- 
tinued all night in prayer to God." After his 
baptism, having been sealed to his solemn of- 
fice by the coming of the Spirit upon him, he 
went away into the wilderness, and was there 
Inthe forty days alone with the beasts of 

wilderness. ^ ^^ Nq doubt that go li tu( J e wag 

full of heavenly sweetness to him. He was 
so long in an ecstasy of devotion that his 
mortal powers gave out. But the blessed 
hours of prayer made him fresh in soul to 
meet the tempter, to hold fast his faith that 
he was the Son of God. Communion with 



148 PRA YER. 

God strengthened him to undertake for lost 
men, who, as he foresaw, would lay on him 
the burden of their wrath and scorn, and 
madly nail him to the cross. As he sought 
the sweet influence of prayer in beginning 
his ministry, so was it a refuge to him when 
that ministry drew to its tragic close. When 
he saw the cross ready, waiting for him to 
be lifted up upon it, he went over the brook 
into a place where was a garden ; and there, 
curtained by the night and the shadows of the 
olive trees, he girded himself for the sacri- 

Gethsem- fice - " Bein g m an &g°ny, ne prayed." 
ane - And then he came to his disciples, and 

found them sleeping, whereupon he went away 
again and prayed ; and then again the third 
time, in the very same words. Thus did he 
overcome the wild fear which had seized hold 
of him. His darkness was turned to light, 
his anguish to peace. He could take the 
cup, which might not pass from him, with a 
firm hand ; could submit himself, in a solemn 
calm, to the judgment of the Father against 
sin, saying, " Thy will, not mine, be done." 



ITS HOUR. 149 

It is true that Christ, who found so much 
comfort and joy in the hour of prayer, felt 
none of those inward hinderances which often 
trouble us. He was the holy Son of God, 
without sin or sinful taint, dwelling in the 
bosom of the Father. The sources of his spir- 
itual life were always open. He was not 
averse to the set time of meeting with God, 
but looked forward eagerly to it. But we 
are naturally strangers to God, con- 
christ-s scious of being his children only as 
pmyerex- we are b° rn a g am ? the new life feeble 

ceeded in ug at fo Q begt> ^ YOm this it follows 

ours. 

that our joy in prayer cannot be the 
unmixed and infinite joy of Christ. Yet it 
is of the same nature as his — a real entering 
into the life of God, though neither so pure 
nor so great. The fact that our joy is less 
than his, shows that we have the more need ; 
it is by our praying that we shall make the 
flesh weaker and the spirit stronger in us ; 
thus rising to the measure of his stature until 
our joy is full. Did he need that strengthen- 
ing which comes by abiding in the Father? 



150 PRA Y ER - 

then we should not dare trust ourselves a 

moment without it. He is not ashamed to 

call us his brethren; yet how little 

Theles * of his consciousness of sonship we have 

our joy, the x 

greater our m us j That consciousness was so vivid 

need. 

in him as to enable him, amid the great- 
est outward confusion, to pray and rejoice in 
spirit. But we, even in the stillness of the 
closet, must struggle to call God Father. 0, 
then, if we would have such brotherliness as 
was in Christ, and call God our Father with 
his full and rejoicing voice, so as to find our 
sweetest solace in the hour of prayer, let us 
be continually entering into our closet, and 
praying to Him who seeth in secret. Thus 
alone can our troubled spirits be at rest, and 
the divine joy, which has begun to warm them, 
make them radiant in all their depths. 

But we have other witness to the precious- 
ness of the hour of prayer. In all ages the 
servants of God, to the degree that they have 
had the spirit of the Son, have delighted in 
the holy duties of the closet. Enoch walked 
with God: and this life of prayer, which he 



ITS HOUR. 151 

lived in a wicked age, lifted him out of the 
common lot till he was translated. Living, and 
believing, he never died. He saw not the face 
of the king of terrors. He laid aside the 
earthly house without a pang or fear. It 
caused no wrench in his feelings, but sent a 
thrill of pleasure through them, to be called 
away into the more open vision. Abraham 
had so much of this spirit, and communed with 
God so often in secret places, that he was 
called "the friend of God." Jacob was named 
^ . Israel because he wrestled in prayer 

Various in- -t •/ 

stances of ^ j ie prevailed. When Moses came 

love for the 

hour of down out of the mount, his face shone 

prayer. 

with the joy of meeting God, so that 
the people were afraid to look on him. That 
shining, so dreadful to consciences defiled by 
idolatry, was the glow of a soul overflowing with 
life. Companionship with God had made the 
spirit of Moses full of light ; he felt the 
strength and peace of a divine indwelling. 
In like manner were all the prophets of Israel 
clothed upon. God feasted them in spirit 
while they prayed before him. By this means 



152 PRA YER - 

came their inspiration; this was the live coal, 
from off the altar, which touched their lips. 
Take out of the record of those holy men of 
old the accounts we have of their secret 
prayers and longings unto God, and the charm 
of that record would be gone. The little 
remnant of outward fact would be dull and 
stale. We can no more think of those men 
without tracing their wondrous works and words 
to the blessed fountain of prayer, than we can 
think of a river as possible without a source, 
or of the light of day as shining without a 

sun. 

Whom did God make ruler over his people, 
and cause the kings of the earth to fear? It 
was the youngest of the sons of Jesse, one 
who from childhood delighted to be alone with 
God. This divine yearning made him a man 
after God's own heart, notwithstanding 
markawe his great wickedness. Though he was 
full of evil impulses, yet he loved to 
feel that God was near him. His sweet Psalms, 
which have been the comfort of so many bur- 
dened hearts, are but the voice of his own 



ITS HOUR. 153 

heart praying in secret. He called upon the 
Lord in the morning, at evening, and during 
the night-watches. The bird that had her nest 
in the wall of the house of prayer, seemed to 
him to be blessed. His heart panted after God. 
He was continually saying, " When shall I 
come, and appear before God ? " " The pray- 
ers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended," 
we read in the seventy-second Psalm. That 
Psalm may be the last of his recorded pray- 
ers, but we cannot think that he ceased pray- 
ing while on earth, or that he now fails to do 
so in heaven. The true Christian never bids 
farewell to his sweet hour of prayer. His 
closet, which is so dear to him here below, 
is but the type of a nearer and sweeter com- 
munion on high. 

Now and always, prayer is the voice of the 
child longing unto its Father ; conscious of a 
divine life coming into it, even as the branch 
•lives by abiding in the vine. There is noth- 
ing which men desire more than the conscious- 
ness of power. Hence their haste to be rich, 
their liking to be in places of authority, their 



154 PRAYER. 

eagerness to make themselves a great name. 
But no such consciousness of power comes 
by these means, as the Christian feels while 
joying in God. In the divine might which 
comes to him through prayer, he is strong 
either to suffer or to do. Nothing is too hard 
for him. He can subdue his evil nature, 

Prayer 

gives the can overcome the world; he beareth 

conscious- 
ness of all things, hopeth all things, believeth 

all things, endureth all things. This 
blessed inworking is that secret of the Lord 
which is with them that fear him. Great 
peace have they with whom this secret abides. 
Here, no doubt, is laid open to us the source 
of what is greatest, purest, and best in men. 
Out of this dwelling in God as a dear child 
came the Confessions of Augustine, the Ser- 
mons of Massillon, the Thoughts of Pascal, the 
sustained fervor of Whitefield. The singing 
men and women, whose hymns make melody 
in our churches all round the world, have 
caught their inspiration in that secret fellow- 
ship with God into which prayer is the ap- 
pointed way. We understand the patriotism 



ITS HOUR. 155 

of Washington, the missionary zeal of Brain- 
erd, the courage of Luther, and the patience 
of the great company of whom the world 
was not worthy, by knowing that they loved 
the hour of prayer. They went often into 
its secret places, where the spirit of dear 
children in them uttered itself; and they felt 
there the life of the Father raising them up 
to newness of life, clothing their spirits with 
the bright garment of joy, witnessing that they 
had been born of God. 

These rejoicing souls have never felt any 
hinderance in coming to God, as though their 
entreaties implied a doubt of his readiness to 
bless, or as though they were putting a private 
wish in the way of changeless decrees. If 
God were a law of nature, a cosmic force, or 
a fate, we might feel an impropriety in prayer. 
But he is our Father, and he is ready to do for 
us above all that we are able to ask, or even 
to think. When we are brought into perfect 
accord with him by the exercise of prayer, 
we grasp the truth of this exceeding readi- 
ness in him, and in our knowing of God as 



156 PRAYER. 

the unwitkholding Father, is that eternal life 
which meets our want, so that we need no 
other answer. •' Do you," says an 
prayer its eminent writer, " pray as a child of 
swer" 1 " God, whose first and nearest relation- 
ship is to God, your Father? whose 
most deeply-felt interests are bound up in that 
relation, in what lies within the circle of that 
relation contemplated in itself? Do you pray 
as one to whom the mind of God towards 
you and your mind towards him are the most 
important elements of existence, and whose 
other interests in existence are outer circles 
around this central interest j so that you see 
yourself, and your family, and your friends, 
and your country, and your race, with the 
e} 7 es, because with the heart of one who loves 
the Lord his God with all his heart, and mind, 
and soul, and strength ? Is this, at least, your 
ideal for yourself; what you are seeking to 
realize, — to realize for its own sake, not for 
the sake of any consequences of it in time 
or eternity ? Then, whatever the blessed con- 
sequences of its realization will be, they shall 



ITS HOUR. 157 

be far and forever inferior and secondary to 
itself." 

Is the hour of prayer distasteful to you? 
Do you not, as God's child, daily experience 
your weakness, so as to be driven to him for 
help? Consider if this blessed duty has not 
been put in such a light that you should 
never again neglect it, but, on the contrary, 
esteem it the one pleasure of vour 

Why dis- r J 

liked by life, with which you allow no stress 

some. 

of worldly cares to interfere ? If you 
find in your closet no upliftings of soul, no 
enlargement of your joy and strength, it must 
be for the reason that you know not how weak 
you are. Your new life in Christ is not in con- 
flict with the forces of evil, with which no 
human power is able to cope, so as to teach 
you how sorely you need the strength of God. 

It is when you find this battle against 
correct this sin too hard for you, that you will love 

to take refuge hi prayer. blessed 
danger, which makes us fly to our Fortress, 
where we find the peace that passeth under- 
standing ! If you, compassed about by infirmi- 



158 PKA YER. 

ties, are daily striving to live the life of the 
holy Son of God, then are you in a conflict 
to which your human power is sadly unequal ; 
forced to say, continually, " Father, save me 
from this hour," — save me from the hour and 
power of darkness by the influence of the hour 
of prayer. He who is not every day forced 
thus to cry out for help cannot be struggling 
to put down all his evil thoughts, to overcome 
the world, to convert sinners to God, to bear 
about the dying and the life of Christ in his 
mortal body. The new-born sons of God are 
all the time finding themselves weak, power- 
less to be in perfect accord with the mind 
and will of the Father. Billows go over their 
head, and they are ready to perish. Not 
drifting along in the currents of worldliness, 
but following their great purpose to be con- 
formed to God, they have such ex- 

Our love of 

prayer the perience of weakness as to be ever 

measure of m 1 

our faith- crying, " Abba, Father, keep us, calm 
us, lead us, give us the victory over 
foes too mighty for our strength? 7 ' In pro- 
portion to the sharpness of this conflict is 



ITS HOUR. 159 

the love of the Christian for his devotional 
hours. He can never cease to love, and long 
for, the sweet time in which his prayer for 
help is answered. It is in his closet, visited 
with the outgoings of the morning and even- 
ing, that he is conscious of deliverance. There 
it is that peace, and joy, and glorious strength 
come into his soul. He turns to the hour of 
prayer as imprisoned plants turn to the sun. 
It is not irksome to him, but full of bene- 
dictions. The bitterest trial of his life would 
be, not to be allowed to pray ; for it is in 
praying that he meets the God of all com- 
fort, and receives a thousandfold for his daily 
conflicts and troubles. 



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